I’m Stefan Vollmer, a doctoral researcher at the University Leeds. In this blog post, I explore how social media data in migration contexts traverses different spaces and reaches different audiences, and how ethnography is ideally placed to explore the temporal and spatial trajectories of such texts. When and how we use our smartphones to ‘go… Read More Data on the move
by Piotr Wegorowski (Cardiff University) The final conference of the TLANG project, which took place on 28 and 29 March, saw an array of thought provoking keynote presentations and a number of individual papers and panels. Amidst the busy and stimulating schedule there was one particular event that the whole TLANG team was proud of… Read More New Publication: The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity
by Caroline Tagg (Open University) and Piotr Wegorowski (Cardiff University) For years you kept your accent in a box beneath the bed, the lock rusted shut by elocution … the teacher’s ruler across your legs (Liz Berry, ‘Homing’ in Black Country, Chatto and Windus 2014) Our four-year TLANG project culminated on 28th and 29th March… Read More TLANG’s Final Conference: Communication in the Multilingual City
University of Birmingham, 2nd February 2018 by Caroline Tagg With its focus on the role of digital communication technologies – and particularly mobile phones – in migrants’ everyday lives, this research seminar provided an opportunity for us to explore the social media data collected as part of the TLANG project. After an introduction to the… Read More Language, social media and migration: a TLANG seminar
James Simpson writes about a documentary theatre production with refugees, which he watched on a recent visit to Finland in November 2017. How can you understand home, as a displaced, dislocated, newly-arrived refugee? How does it feel to be faced with finding a new way to belong? How can you express your belonging and non-belonging,… Read More Toinen Koti – Other Home
7th December 2017, Pierhead building, Cardiff By Caroline Tagg, Open University The location of our second Network Assembly in Cardiff was, as Angela Creese pointed out in her welcome address, particularly apt given that it was in Wales that Cen Williams first introduced the concept of trawsieithu (‘translanguaging’). The Network Assembly focused on the sports… Read More Action in the Superdiverse City: a Network Assembly
By Adrian Blackledge, University of Birmingham In July I attended two performances of ‘Summer Times’, the production we commissioned from creative company Women and Theatre as a response to the outcomes, questions, and loose ends generated by TLANG. These would be the only Birmingham-based public performances of a show created for community-based older audiences. I… Read More Summer Times
Mike Baynham In this short vignette, based on reflections on translanguaging in social media from the sports phase, Leeds case study co-investigator Mike Baynham describes his experiences of text messaging multilingually and multimodally. Tiago, one of the project’s key participants in Leeds, is a basketball and capoeira player from Mozambique. This is the story of… Read More Text messaging as a language learning opportunity
Jessica Bradley Erin Moriarty Harrelson and Amandine Le Maire, project researchers for the MobileDeaf project at Heriot Watt University have written an account of their experiences as TLANG summer school delegates. You can find the blog post, with text by Erin and videos by Amandine, here.
Jessica Bradley and Piotr Wegorowski Friday was the fifth and final day of the summer school. The weather had cooled down dramatically from earlier in the week and we were all tired but still full of energy and thoughts for how we might be able to take forward the ideas that we had been discussing… Read More Summer School: Day Five
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