Education and visiting researcher in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on multilingual and multimodal practices in community arts and her doctoral research traces the trajectory of a text as it is developed into a street arts production. She has interests in coproduction and collaboration with artists and creative practitioners in the field of language and communication research. She has project managed and researched multiple arts-based co-produced projects including with refugees in West Yorkshire.

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Apprenticeship reforms have paved the way for higher education providers, including universities, to become Degree Apprenticeship (DA) training providers, creating new workbased Higher Education (HE) routes. The changes aim to generate a new cohort of skilled individuals to support national economic growth, as well as improve levels of social mobility. This paper focusses on a HE partnership project which resulted in a number of collaborative models for development that address these aims.The paper focuses on qualitative interviews undertaken during the process of creating DAs through a consortium of higher education providers. It considers the collaborative relationships which were built on and which developed across the course of the short-term project. It assesses the concept of competitive collaboration and its link to social mobility.The paper considers the various manifestations of collaboration which supported the DA developments in a competitive environment: collaboration as embedded; collaboration as negotiation and as a driver for social mobility or social equality.The uniqueness of this large collaboration of colleges and universities is that it has been a vehicle to raise the status of apprenticeships, provide opportunities for development of new DA curricula and enable practitioners to establish this as a new route into HE. The paper questions current but limited knowledge about the impact of DAs on social mobility and equality.

In this article we draw on data from a co-produced transdisciplinary arts and language practice and research project. In this project, researchers, artists and creative practitioners worked with refugees and people seeking asylum. Together we developed and led arts-based workshops, which aimed to explore what it means to be ‘welcome’, how we ‘welcome’ and how we want to be ‘welcomed’. As researchers we approached the project from different disciplinary spaces: Sam from applied theatre and Jessica from sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. Through analysis of our co-produced artistic outputs, through ethnographic writing and through our reflections on the processes of collaborating, we consider how arts practices engage with narratives of migration in refugee communities. We take three elements of the project: visual arts products in the form of silk paintings, community voices in the form of vignettes and media documentation in the form of a project film. We suggest how these examples embody the processes and the community developed around the project and the different ways of working across sectors with displaced communities to engage with and enable spaces for voices to be made audible. We use ‘refugee’ throughout this article to refer to people who have been granted asylum, people who are in the process of granting asylum, and people whose asylum claims have been rejected. We choose not to use the phrase ‘asylum seekers’ due to its often negative connotations in the British press.

order to ensure transparency in the development of this document, it arose from a Translating Cultures and Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community (School of Advanced Study) workshop hosted at the Institute of Modern Languages Research in November 2017 and the ideas within are consequently indebted to all those who contributed to the day (see Wells for details of all of the speakers at the event, in addition to F. Carpenedo, B. Spadaro and G. Wall who took detailed notes). An initial document was subsequently drafted by N. Wells and C. Forsdick, and circulated to all speakers and attendees for further comment. The authors listed alphabetically here are those who contributed with valuable additional responses, suggestions and comments and who subsequently were actively consulted and involved in producing the final version.

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I Opening commentsWe thank the editors for inviting us to make this final comment on the special issue, which represents an important opening-up of the language education field to consider, and make more prominent, the links between language and intercultural education, the arts and social engagement. We warmly welcome this move and are delighted to see this special issue published. We hope that the special issue contributes to more communicatively and culturally holistic, and more just, language education. In this short epilogue we offer some thoughts on how and where these ideas might develop in the future.

This article reports on part of an ethnographic research project undertaken over a period of 20 months in Leeds, UK, with a youth spoken word (YSW) poetry organisation. The research focused on the fluid practices in which the youth engage that span spoken, written, visual, gestural, digital, musical and spatial modes, and across times and places. Given its inherent fluidities, YSW is a particularly interesting practice for studying semiosis. Among other aspects, the research focused on the trajectories of poems written and performed by youth and the semiotic transformations they undergo across time and space. The article explores how resemiotisation sheds light on the complexities of the transformations that one particular poem undergoes as it travels. It focuses on a poem titled 'To Him', written and performed by a 17-year old poet. The main arguments put forward are that: 1) translanguaging is a more comprehensive term than others for describing how the poet engages her repertoire; 2) resemiotisation is both a lens for conceptualising translanguaging, and an indispensable analytical process in the case of the data studied for understanding the complexities of the poet's meaning-making practices. Looking beyond our own discipline and making use of musical annotation, we contend that focusing solely on spoken and written language, as is the case in much research on plurilingualism and translanguaging, would be insufficient to gauge the complexity of the meaning-making process undertaken by the young poet (e.g. Pennycook, 2017).