Visiting research in Jyväskylä, Finland

Figure 1 Photograph of the author wearing headphones, sunglasses and a hat, by one of the lake beaches

I’ve been visiting researcher at Jyväskylä University since the start of October 2021 as part of a funded scheme. I undertook the first part of the ‘visit’ remotely, and then travelled from the UK mid-month, to spend the final two weeks working with colleagues at the university, in the Centre for Applied Language Studies.

Over the course of my time as visiting researcher, I’ve been working with Sari Pöyhönen, an applied linguist with an interest in researching in and through the arts, who invited me to participate in the visit. Sari’s recent projects have engaged with creative practice in different ways: the Jag bor I Oravais (I live in Oravais) project explored people’s experience of seeking asylum in Swedish Ostrobothnia; Toinen koti (Other home) was a documentary theatre project led by the Finnish National Theatre; and Rajojen yli (Crossing Borders) took the concept of belonging as central, interweaving different arts practices to consider what belonging means to different people.

Figure 2, Figure 3 and Figure 4 all show aspects of the university campus which includes many buildings designed by Alvar Aalto

The plans we set out for this visit centred on how we’ve both worked with artists and creative practitioners in our research over the past few years. My own current and recent projects include Multilingual Streets, for which arts based methods and ways of knowing are used to understand people’s experiences and perceptions of living multilingually, while the recent exhibition I co-organised, Visual Representations of Multilingualism, considered how artists engage with ideas of multilingualism, living multilingually and being multiligual. I’m interested in how these relationships and different understandings of research questions and methodologies open up ideas and take the research in very different creative directions. I’ve written more about this here.

Figure 5 and Figure 6 show one of the city lakes — Jyväsjärvi — from different perspectives

Over the course of my visit, and with Senior Researcher Saara Jäntti, whose research has explored theatre in different social contexts, including sheltered housing programmes and mental health care services, we have been working on a co-written research article, a conference colloquium for summer 2022, and an online seminar, organised between Jyväskylä University and the University of Sheffield, which will take place in Spring 2022. Sari and I are presenting our work together at an invited seminar at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu towards the end of the research visit. The invitation came from Heli Paulasto, a linguist also working with and through the arts. Heli is a member of a research group whose work aims to create connections and new openings between research, art and societal actors.

It has been incredibly productive to spend time talking about our research projects together, the shared questions we have and the different perspectives that we — and our collaborators — bring. I would like to thank the Centre for Applied Language Studies — in particular Sari — for hosting me, Jyväskylä University for funding the visit, and my colleagues in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield for supporting me to be able to spend this time on research leave. It’s been an interesting experience to travel in the midst of COVID19 and I am grateful to be able to do this, aware of the uniqueness of the opportunity. Thanks are also due to my family for being so understanding about me going away without them.

You can find out more about Jessica’s work here, and read her latest article, an invited epilogue with Lou Harvey (University of Leeds) for a special issue of Language Teaching Research which focused on the arts, intercultural communication and language education.

Jessica Bradley, Lecturer in Literacies, Co-Director Literacies Research Cluster and BA Education, Culture and Childhood