Talking Linguistic Landscapes, young people and arts-based practice in Barcelona

On 22 January 2020 Dr Jessica Bradley delivered seminars at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, invited by Dr Melinda Dooly, Head of GREIP (Grup de Recerca en Ensenyament i Interacció Plurilingües). She offered advice on conducting ethnographic research in multilingual contexts to current doctoral researchers from the university, drawing on her experiences of conducting her own doctoral research on translanguaging with street artists.

She then led a seminar based on her current research project, Multilingual Streets: Translating and Curating the Linguistic Landscape, which uses creative and participatory methods to explore the linguistic landscapes of Manchester and Sheffield. Workshop participants were able to try out the creative methods for themselves in a zine making workshop, using linguistic landscape images collected from the Sant Antoni area of Barcelona. The group discussed some of her recent findings around linguistic landscapes and pedagogy and the role of arts-based methods in engaging with young people.

Jessica would like to thank Dr Melinda Dooly and Dr Emilee Moore for the invitation and the warm welcome (despite the cyclone!).

More information about this area of research is published in the Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication (Bradley et al., 2018). A chapter which considers this work in more detail (Bradley & Atkinson, 2020) is published in a forthcoming book, co-edited with Dr Emilee Moore and Dr James Simpson, ‘Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities’, published in May 2020 by Multilingual Matters. A series of materials will be available to download from the project website in Spring 2020. Watch this space!

By Jessica Bradley, Lecturer in Literacies