Translanguaging space and creative activity: theorising collaborative arts-based learning

Abstract

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.

Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research

“…Beyond the four stages in my research into street arts production, intense encounters with the worlds of the performers were embedded within the context of creating a series of collaborative projects with the organisation's artistic director (see McKay and Bradley 2016;Bradley et al 2018), therefore extending far beyond the five-month fieldwork period. I did not (and could not) train to do street theatre myself while undertaking my research.…”

Researching the Intercultural: Intersubjectivity and the Problem with Postpositivism

“…Despite these becoming the stock-in-trade of sociolinguistics in the latter part of the twentieth century, with hindsight these sociolinguistic sub-groupings can be seen to exhibit some of the same drawbacks as methodological nationalism, since they can also 'embody an essentialist view of culture and use it as a taken-for-granted variable in understanding and describing communicative differences' (Sarangi 1995: 100). with unstructured interviews, and the workshop-based production of collage (Bradley et al 2018). In so doing, they are able to deploy a series of intersecting methods which are fully contextualized and responsive to the social situation under investigation.…”

Translanguaging engagement: Dynamic multilingualism and university language engagement programmes

“…During the school half term holidays in 2016-2017, young people from Leeds-based educational centres in the east and south of the city, carried out a similar exercise but with larger, life-sized portraits which worked to demonstrate the shared elements of our communicative repertoires (for a fuller analysis, see Bradley et al, 2018). This was part of a three-day programme of language and arts engagement work …”

“…We have conducted detailed multimodal analyses of translanguaging and embodiment in the context of sports clubs in terms of distributed cognition in basketball training (Callaghan, Moore, & Simpson, 2018). We have broadened our scope to encompass the visual, using arts-based methods and collage as a way of considering how visual arts and literacy might be used to open up translanguaging spaces for creativity and criticality in language and in transdisciplinary pedagogy (Atkinson & Bradley, 2017;Bradley, Moore, Simpson, & Atkinson, 2018). The materiality of translanguaging, and the objects and props created by artists for street arts production has been explored alongside and in connection with the transmodality of spoken word poetry and musical adaptation.…”

“…García & Li Wei, 2014;Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015;MacSwan, 2017) as one particular lens for understanding dynamic multilingualism, empirical evidence drawn from an ethnographic research project with multilingual street artists, and university languages engagement work with schools and colleges. I consider a current example of research-led engagement work, LangScape Curators (Atkinson & Bradley, 2017;Bradley, Moore, Simpson, & Atkinson, 2018), to sketch out possible directions for research and practice in this area.…”