Language and belonging in multilingual settings: Doing arts-based linguistic ethnography
Invited seminar at University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, 28 October 2021
During my recent visiting research fellowship at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, Jyväskylä University in October, for which I was invited and hosted by Sari Pöyhönen, we travelled to Joensuu to give a talk at the University of Eastern Finland. Sari and I had been invited by Heli Paulasto, a linguist also researching multilingualism in community arts contexts, to talk about our research to students and colleagues. Heli has been a really active member of the AILA Research Network in Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics, which Jessica co-led from 2018–2021 with Lou Harvey (University of Leeds) and Emilee Moore (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and had travelled to Leeds in participate in our BAAL CUP seminar in July 2019, where she talked about her project, ‘Researching and Enabling Art’.
Sari and I decided to present two of our projects — Multilingual Streets (Jessica) and Toinen Koti (Sari). The projects are — at first glance — quite different from each other. Multilingual Streets explores artistic and creative approaches to linguistic landscapes, and how young people experience and engage with multilingualism in everyday life. In this way it fuses together artistic and linguistic ways of seeing, deliberately slowing down our engagements with and interpretations of language in public space. This kind of transdisciplinary approach acknowledges the complexity of our engagements and the ways that different lenses enable different perspectives. It asks that we actively engage with linguistic landscapes and consciously curate our environments. Toinen Koti (2016–2018) was a documentary theatre project led by the National Theatre in Helsinki. The project sought to bring together artists and actors who were also refugees and asylum seekers in Finland to work with local-born creative practitioners to create and perform a theatre production based on ideas of home and belonging. Sari had been involved in the project as a researcher, working closely with the director (Jussi Lehtonen), production team and actors. This project continued her applied linguistics research which engages with the arts — her previous research Jag Bor i Oravais had explored photography with unaccompanied migrant youth.
We presented bilingually — in English and Finnish, with Sari responding in Finnish to my presentation and vice versa. We started by considering some of the concepts which are central to our research — arts-based research, translanguaging and belonging and non-belonging, as well as introducing the methodological points of departure for our work — linguistic and visual ethnography. I showed some outputs from Multilingual Streets, including the two zines (see here and here) created through images made by the young people participating in the project. Sari showed a short video which had been made about the production process for Toinen Koti and the merging of creative practice, research and refugee activism (you can read more about it here).
It was a really fruitful experience to be able to present these projects side by side, and it helped us to explore more of the alignments between them. We noticed how the projects were inspired by particular events and social contexts, and the ways in which different institutional identities and discourses shaped the processes and often propelled the work in unforeseen directions. We also found that both projects challenged field-based understandings of what constitutes ‘data’ in these contexts and how multidisciplinary teams collaborate and negotiate spaces for creativity.
Many thanks to Heli Paulasto for inviting us and for the warm welcome we received in Joensuu. Kiitos!
The slides for our presentation are available here.
In the edited book, Translanguaging as Transformation: the collaborative construction of new linguistic realities, you can find a chapter by Sari about the Jag Bor i Oravais project, written with colleagues Lotta Kokkonen, Mirja Tarnanen and Maija Lappalainen on ‘Belonging, Trust and Relationships: Collaborative Photography with Unaccompanied Minors’ (Chapter 3) and a chapter I wrote with artist collaborator Louise Atkinson, about linguistic landscapes research and the arts ‘Translanguaging beyond Bricolage: Meaning Making and Collaborative Ethnography in Community Arts’ (Chapter 7). The editors talk about the book here.
Jessica Bradley, University of Sheffield and Sari Pöyhönen, Jyväskylä University
