What is The Observation Protocol for Academic Literacies and How Can It Be Used?

We recently published The Observation Protocol for Academic Literacies by Magaly Lavadenz and Elvira G. Armas. In this post the authors explain what the Observation Protocol for Academic Literacies (OPAL) is and why it’s important.

What were the origins of the book?

Originally, we knew that we wanted to develop a tool to support culturally and linguistically diverse students’ learning – specifically English Learners – through understanding their teachers’ professional practices to inform education systems. We spent many hours in over 300 Pre-K-12th grade classrooms across 22 sites and captured anecdotal notes to create vignettes and highlights of classroom practice, including video footage from select classrooms. Once we had developed and tested the tool, we created a three-day institute to share the key principles of the science and practice of observation and the research background and context for The Observation Protocol for Academic Literacies (OPAL). We used video and written vignettes that we collected and created processes to practice scoring and capturing anecdotal notes with the OPAL. After about 10 years of Institutes, we decided to work towards converting these lived experiences into a book format.

What is OPAL and how can it be used?

The OPAL is a classroom observation tool comprised of four research-based domains and 18 indicators. The OPAL is intricately woven into each chapter of our book, with four chapters dedicated to learning about how to “look for” evidence in each domain with clear vignettes and snapshots from real Pre-K-12 classrooms. We share the research literature to foreground the empirical literature that informed the OPAL and the skill of objective observation. We end the book with many examples of how, along with other OPAL users across the educational continuum, we have used the OPAL to support teachers, identify priorities in professional learning, and inform research.

Why is the book so needed?

There is so much “unpacking” to do when it comes to EL teachers’ practices and we don’t believe in formulas. Our book helps to unpack pedagogical gems gleaned from the research and reflected in the OPAL instrument to help sharpen our focus on ELs across any type of instructional setting. The OPAL offers a compass to gain a deeper understanding of effective teaching and learning for ELs to tailor teaching methods responsive to students’ linguistic, academic, and social-emotional needs. By embracing the OPAL protocol, educators, researchers, and institutions can collectively contribute to the cultivation of a robust community of practice that is elevated through personal and collective professional reflection.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?

We wanted to transform our in-person OPAL Institutes into a resource that can be more broadly used, from preservice to inservice teachers, professional development and for administrators who can make policy decisions for how teachers can support each other through peer observations, learning and resource allocation. This includes time for critical reflection on the education of English Learners to promote deep learning and development of academic literacies among students.

What is your next academic project after this one?

One of the next projects that our team is working on and which we’re so excited about is focused on Adolescent Superdiversity. We want to break apart the notion of a monolithic definition of English Learners and subtypologies by uplifting the voices of superdiverse adolescent youth across the state. We have been meeting with these youth and they have many important and compelling ideas and insights to share, from which we can all learn!

What books – either for work or for pleasure – are you reading at the moment?

Magaly is reading The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society (2023) by Viorica Marian. Elvira is reading Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning (2023) by Gholdy Muhammad.

Magaly Lavadenz and Elvira G. Armas

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Professional Development through Teacher Research edited by Darío Luis Banegas, Emily Edwards and Luis S. Villacañas de Castro. 

Uplifting Indigenous Mexican Languages and Identities in Schools

We will soon be publishing Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students by William Perez and Rafael Vásquez.  In this post the authors set the stage for their book and discuss its importance.

Last June, Griselda Zarate, a young Indigenous Mexican-origin student, spoke to Spanish-language television about the racial discrimination she and her sister faced while attending the Santa Rita Union School District in Central California USA. The racism that students like Griselda face often spreads by other Mexicans and manifests by language-shaming for the way Indigenous Mexicans speak. Popular culture ridicules Indigenous languages as dialects, holding unequal power relationships against Spanish and English. As a result of these aggressions, the school district passed a resolution to prohibit the disparaging terms “Oaxaquita/o” and “Indito” which translate to “little Oaxacan” and “little Indian” referring to the widely held belief that Indigenous people from Mexico’s Guerrero and Oaxaca states are racially inferior. The district will also establish the first Indigenous Mixtec after school program so that children can have access to learning their language.

California is considered the state with the largest concentration of Indigenous Mexicans. By one estimate, about 800,000 Oaxacans have settled in Southern California and are mostly Zapotec peoples. These communities come from diverse cultures and often speak at least one of the 68 Indigenous languages of Mexico. Despite their rich social, cultural, and linguistic practices, they face many challenges in healthcare, the labor force, education, and other institutions due to historically lived discrimination.

After decades of living among and working with Indigenous communities in Los Angeles, we decided to conduct a study in Southern California with over 150 Indigenous youth from three groups: Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and P’urhépechas. We wanted to find out what happens to Indigenous students who attend schools but largely go unnoticed, or when noticed, face scrutinization. In our book, Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students, we ask: how do Indigenous students experience school, given the traumas many have faced in Mexico for being labeled Indigenous, for speaking Spanish ‘with an accent’ due to the ‘inhibiting’ Indigenous ‘dialects’ they speak, or for coming from ‘underdeveloped’ communities and where society regards them as intellectually ‘inferior’? And how can schools be responsive and address the need to leverage Indigenous students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds to make meaningful connections to their schooling experiences so they can achieve equitable educational opportunities?

To answer these questions, we looked at students’ multilingualism from the perspective that languages interact with each other and the places they are spoken. Since many Indigenous youth experience language across and in between borders, we introduce a transcultural and translingual approach to illustrate the dynamic and intersectional processes that Indigenous youth engage to construct their identities and linguistic practices in social and educational settings. We emphasize adolescents’ agency in actively negotiating and constructing their identities and the influence of their non-Indigenous Mexican peers and teachers. Despite the verbal abuse youth face, the development of transcultural practices often serves to reinvigorate a sense of who they are and creates strategies to actively debunk anti-Indigenous beliefs. Therefore, the book intends to inform supportive environments that affirm Indigenous identities and languages, foster critical consciousness, and value the transnational experiences of Indigenous Mexican youth.

Studying Indigenous educational experiences and the critical issues these students face is significant to developing innovative approaches in Latinx cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and intra-group ethnic/racial relations. Educational researchers and policymakers will find the book of tremendous value, as it is the first book to our knowledge that examines the academic pathways and identities of Indigenous Mexican students. The findings of this study have the potential to inform local, state, and national policies affecting Indigenous migrant students. Adolescent development scholars will also find the book useful since few studies have been done examining migrant Indigenous youth identity development. We hope that our book contributes to education justice initiatives so that Indigenous students are invisible no more.

Please let us know your thoughts.  We’d like to hear from you.

Rafael Vásquez (rafael.vasquez@cgu.edu) and William Perez (william.perez@lmu.edu)

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Overcoming the Gentrification of Dual Language, Bilingual and Immersion Education edited by M. Garrett Delavan, Juan A. Freire and Kate Menken.

Pop Culture Tourism and Fan Pilgrimage

This month we published Touristic World-Making and Fan Pilgrimage in Popular Culture Destinations edited by Vassilios Ziakas, Christine Lundberg and Maria Lexhagen. In this post we find out more about the editors’ research and their own fan pilgrimages.

How did you come to be interested in the field of popular culture tourism?

Our interest in popular culture tourism began in 2008 when the first movie based on the Twilight Saga book series was released, and we came across travel accounts from tourists travelling to the “homes” of the vampires and werewolves featured in the series. It made us start thinking about our own earlier excursions to, for example, Scotland with the purpose to visit locations featured in the 1986 movie Highlander and to France to places associated with the Irish alternative rock band U2 (more on that below). We instinctively understood that there were some interesting common grounds that linked different types of popular culture expressions (e.g. film, TV shows, music, literature) and their audiences longing to experience the physical (and digital) spaces and places associated with their interest, that were also exciting to explore in academic literature and empirical work.

Why did you feel this was an important book to write?

This book challenges the dominion of reductionist, insulated and fragmentalist perspectives that prompt the continuous compartmentalisation of popular culture and tourism. This has resulted in overspecialised niche forms of cultural-related travel products that are disjointed, cause further divisions and are used ad hoc by destinations. Different understandings, values and expectations underpin their narrow concentration and interests, which hamper broader synergies and collaboration. We challenge these shortcomings by employing an interdisciplinary holistic approach. We suggest that popular culture tourism is a comprehensive phenomenon comprising different forms of leisure and expressive culture as they intersect with tourism. On this basis, we merge patterns of fan pilgrimage and placemaking to shed light on the making of popular culture destinations. This holistic approach enables to better understand how ‘touristic worlds’ are co-constructed by the interaction of various stakeholders, especially fan travel behaviour and the responses of destinations. Also, a holistic approach led us to encompass different ontological and epistemological paradigms as signified by the thematic, disciplinary and methodological diversity of the chapter contributions. This variety does not invoke diversity for its own sake. Instead, it allows for exploring how popular culture destinations create symbolic schemes of the world, patterned with visions, images and stories of each fandom that represent particular worldviews and lifestyles. Consequently, this volume pushes to refocus our outlook and ontological-epistemological angles in the tourism field towards building more holistic frameworks and models, thereby redirecting attention on compound processes and composite practices of synthesis. We make a strong case for making this turn. With this book, we encourage scholars to overcome insulated logics and explore avenues for enabling truly interdisciplinary integration and synthesis in tourism and beyond.

What are the key takeaways you hope readers will come away with?

The notion of world-making is at the core of the book exploring the ways that popular culture destinations are made. It is shown how world-making emanates from the interaction of fan communities that envisage singular or multiple realities, conventional or alternative orders, conservative or radical possibilities, and their interpretations by destination stakeholders that shape realist responses and policies for popular culture tourism development. It is thus demonstrated that destination responses are characterised by the complex and creative appropriation of fandoms, heritage, digital media, spatial topographies and physiognomies, as well as world imaginaries for the purpose of placemaking. This builds up a universe of animated signs and meanings, a highly heterogeneous cosmos that combines, though disorderly and at times randomly, fantasy and reality. The employment of world-making as an analytical framework enables a holistic take on fandoms, their pilgrimage journeys and the touristification of places. In this context, interrelationships and interaction effects can be thoroughly examined by addressing the dialectical interface of the following binary parameters in the making of popular culture destinations:

  • Imagination and Reality
  • Tourism as Special Time and the Everyday
  • Fan and Place Identities
  • Living Heritage of Fandoms and Destinations
  • Fan Pilgrimage Experience and Resident Quality of Life
  • Commodification and Authenticity
  • Individual Fandom Expressions and Hybridisation
  • Culture and Digitalisation
  • Strategy and Placemaking

As you compiled your book, did anything in the research particularly surprise or intrigue you?

It certainly is striking how powerful fan practices are in shaping intended and unintended popular culture destinations and attractions, sometimes matching the ideas of local and tourism stakeholders. How plural views of world-making are so important for the successful making of place and cultural change as well as having the capacity of holding conflicting meanings. Fan pilgrimage and popular culture tourism really are influential in visioning the futures of the world through bridging the local with the global.

Also, how rewarding it was to see how the contributions of this book came together and connect until now mostly unconnected perspectives. We are very happy to share through this book, our effort in building an interdisciplinary analysis and shedding light on places, fans, pasts, present and future ways of life and how they combine in creating and recreating popular culture capital and the socioeconomic, political and environmental consequences that emerge from it.

What are you fans of? What are some pilgrimages you’ve personally done?

One of us has been a dedicated fan of U2 (the Irish rock band) and their music for many decades. Many trips in the footsteps of the band have been done over the years such as to France, Ireland, Sweden and Portugal, while also engaging in online communities with other fans as well as a longstanding membership of their official fan club. Often, these travel experiences create a strong emotional connection to places visited or of being part of a crowd before, in and after a concert. Family and friends have also tagged along in sometimes surprising explorations of places associated with the band, or band members, in for them unexpected places. Some tangible pieces of these intangible and multisensory experiences are now on display as memorabilia filling up an entire purpose-bought cabinet at home.

From the empirical work on popular culture tourism we have done, we know that generational travelling is sometimes important as a motivating factor. Another personal example of being a fan is that one of the editors has a strong connection through the interest of children in the family, to ice hockey. This has led to several pilgrimage trips to the ice hockey mecca of New York city visiting games, taking guided tours for fans, and encounters with hockey team celebrities. These ‘sacred’ experiences not only build an even stronger commitment to the sport, but also link the everyday family practice of sports with fan travelling.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Contents Tourism and Pop Culture Fandom edited by Takayoshi Yamamura and Philip Seaton.

Newly-Available Open Access Backlist Titles

Towards the end of 2023 we announced our new Open Access Fund and following on from that we are delighted to tell you that we have made five of our backlist titles available as Open Access publications. All five are available under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

The titles are:

Multilingual Matters

Channel View Publications

These titles will be permanently available to download with no access restrictions or paywalls via our website using the Download For Free button.

If you have any questions about our Open Access titles, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@channelviewpublications.com.

“Spanish So White” Now Accessible as an Audiobook!

We recently brought out our very first audiobook of our 2023 title Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz. In this post Adam explains why it was so important for him that the book be available in audio format.

Upon the first anniversary of the publication of Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education, I’m so pleased to announce that my book is now available in audio format. I narrate my own text, which was recorded, mixed and edited at Don Ross Productions, in Eugene, Oregon. I send special thanks to Multilingual Matters and the Center for Humanities at Oregon State University, both of whom provided essential funding for this effort.

From the outset of its writing, I attempted to draft and design Spanish So White as a highly accessible text. I’ve thought a lot about its accessibility this past year, and how this has or has not been realized for its readers. Leading up to and following the book’s publication, I was tasked with helping Multilingual Matters to publicize Spanish So White widely. Implicit in this effort is a request to ensure that the book’s content is engaging, relatable, accessible.

Even before pitching a proposal to Multilingual Matters and other publishers, I imagined that an accessible book about language education, race and Whiteness could and should take many forms. For instance, I was thrilled that my work would not only be available in print, but through the flexible modality of an ebook. Additionally, of primary priority was a need to depart from academic discourse whenever possible. This was most challenging. As researchers, we have been trained to communicate in ways that (1) assume an audience of fellow scholars whose work falls within a shared academic community of practice; and (2) reproduce standardized language in order to communicate “rigor”. Throughout my writing process, I thought about wisdom of my students, my family, or an unknown individual encountering this book online, or perhaps at the recommendation of another. Would my words invite those wisdoms into the “conversations” this book urges are necessary? Would a reliance on academic language reproduce the very Whiteness I intended to challenge?

Questions of accessibility also extended to the length, organization, and layout of my book. This is not a long volume. I wanted the book’s physical size to communicate a lightness, to counter the necessary heft of topics taken up within. I was fortunate to have creative input in the design of the cover: Suggested in its artistry is a kaleidoscopic view of what a Spanish “So White” might entail. In addition, I knew that a shorter book would cost less for the buying public. I think often about how my students regularly go into debt when purchasing course textbooks in a given semester; I therefore hoped that a book addressing issues of social inequity would be affordable as possible. Multilingual Matters assured me that my book could be sold under $20 in paperback, and indeed, such is the case.

Finally, many of us have very little time to read, and this includes those for whom regular reading is essential: Students and teachers. This book is written expressly for this audience, of which I am a part. I personally enjoy flexible access to audiobooks for this very reason, and I know many others do as well. I commute to my campus by car, but I also walk, run and take care of life around the house – my daily soundtrack necessarily alternates music and spoken narration of all sorts. If a book is particularly engaging, I’ll be inclined to locate a hard copy as well, so I may pivot between versions, and not lose access to visuals or the personality of a book’s packaging.

As a text that invites conversation, Spanish So White is waiting to be “heard” in this new format. I’m excited about the possibilities of its impact, just as other texts in their audio format, in fact, impacted my own writing of Spanish So White (Amanda Montell’s Wordslut, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, among many others). I’ve also assigned portions of a few texts, also read by their authors, for my own students. To engage with one’s written language is a gift, but listening to one’s voice suggests a particularly personal, dialogic connection.

Listening indeed invites us to engage differently. In my book, I write about listening as method, one where we must be present and awake in multiple senses. As such, this recording is meant to be shared. Listen with your friends, your family, and your students – whomever joins you in the work of dismantling racism and White supremacy. Take a break and debrief not only at the pause points, but whenever something resonates and invites you to more deeply think, feel and act. This book is yours, as ever.

One limitation to an audiobook, as alluded to above, is that its affordances do not include illustrations and other referents that appear in the print edition. While an audiobook may activate our imaginations, it might be helpful to see images, read captions and interact with pause points that require a more visual scaffolding. Please visit the Multilingual Matters website for the full complement of resources to accompany you on your listening journey. Along the way, you’ll be prompted when a visit to this site is necessary for your participation.

Publishing this book in triplicate – physical copy, ebook and audio – was a significant ask for Multilingual Matters. This is the first audiobook for my publisher, and while I’m so grateful they took a risk on me, I hope it’s not their last. My hope is that the audiobook engages with an expanded audience of reader-listeners, and that it inspires future researchers and educators to write with the accessibility of this format in mind.

Please let me know what Spanish So White sounds like to you. Let’s converse! My email is adam.schwartz@oregonstate.edu.

Adam Schwartz

This audiobook is available on Audible UK here, Audible US here and from other audiobook retailers. You can learn more about the book from the author himself in a recent online author event here.

What Happens When We Undo and Reimagine Gender and Language Together?

This month we published Redoing Linguistic Worlds edited by Kris Aric Knisely and Eric Louis Russell. In this post the editors explain why the book is so necessary.

Has anyone ever told you that the way you language is “wrong”? That it “doesn’t exist”? That “you can’t” do or say or sign something in the way that you have? And, yet, here you are, speaking, writing, signing – doing language in those ways. As a languager – someone doing any form of linguistic activity – you are existing, shaping your world, and sharing that world with others (even if some of those people attempt to use claims to linguistic authority and power to suggest that you are not).

The kind of language pedantry that would suggest that anyone’s language is impossible or wrong is not new. Language is always a site of contestation, controversy, expansion, and tension. Language seems to always stir up these kinds of attitudes about what can and cannot (or what should and should not) be. We live with language attitudes and, often, we accept them as more palatable covers for racism, classism, sexism, cissexism, binarism, and other oppressive systems.

Why? What are these attitudes doing in our worlds and what’s behind them? Frequently, language attitudes are used as a tool to constrain and conserve, as a part of futile attempts to circumvent a core truth: Language is always changing, in large part because the linguistic doings, redoings, and undoings of languagers are very real ways of expressing how they understand their worlds. And like the individuals and collectives that inhabit them, these worlds are always shifting.

With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we – and our contributors – ask: What happens when we undo and reimagine gender and language together? What happens when we move beyond cislingualism (i.e. the intersection between normative ideas about language and about gender modality that center and value cisgender positionalities and ways of doing language)? In what ways is this about a movement past gender binarism (i.e. the idea that gender is a man/woman binary)? How does this open up possibilities for moving past other binarities (e.g. gender modality as a trans/cis dichotomy)? Where and in what ways is this about an expansion of gender? When is it about fluidizing – a blurring of the very concept that people can, might, or should be gendered in any way? How might it be about expanding, fluidizing, burning down, and reimagining all at once?

For those of us whose genders exist beyond normative frames, these questions are evidently bound up in the ways that we experience our worlds and the languaging through which they are constantly remade; these questions are the intellectual exploration of our lives and linguacultures. For others of us – those who sit more comfortably within dominant frames for doing language and gender – these questions may appear less salient, less obligatory; they are not about our own self-understandings, but a means of respecting and honoring those of others. Yet, it is a fallacy to think that we are not all involved in this change-in-progress: When someone engages singular they or xe or any form that expands their linguistic world, they ask others –directly or indirectly – to also expand their own.

If you’re reading this blog post, these are perhaps lackluster examples – you undoubtedly are familiar with such expansions in Anglophone settings – but what of other linguacultural spaces? What does this “redoing the world through redoing languaging habits” look like for others, especially in communities in which gender markings are done more extensively than in English, such as those deploying canonically-labelled masculine and feminine forms? How are languagers remaking the linguistic world through German, Spanish, French, or Italian?

We began this project with the observation that there is relatively little attention given to these linguacultural contexts and their inhabitants – and that what has been given is often rendered through an appropriating, approximating lens. Rather than simply calque understandings of Anglophone patterns onto those of other languaging ecosystems, or map cislingual frames onto communities that reject these, we wanted to understand these from within. And hence Redoing Linguistic Worlds was born.

This volume, the first of its kind to our knowledge, brings into conversation scholars working on how people do language and gender together in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Each of the chapters takes a different perspective – some focusing on classroom pedagogy and teaching practices, others on empirical data from various languagers, still more taking ethnographic approaches to the question of how redoing is accomplished, how it affects the lives of languagers and what any redoing means, individually and collectively. We’re thrilled to see these works be made available to the public – and to participate in the conversations that they engender, wrestle with the questions they ask, and attend to the perspectives they manifest.

We join with many of our colleagues (both those who are a part of this volume and those working beyond its purview) to assert – as the late John Henner so directly and perfectly stated: “How you language is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you your language is wrong. Your languaging is the story of your life.” With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we begin to sketch the contours of these beautiful linguistic worlds that are undone, reimagined, and remade when the infiniteness of language meets that of gender.

(Spoiler alert: These infinite galaxies cannot be contained in one volume – We are already formulating the next volume, in which we hope to continue to expand the conversation past well-trodden spaces. We invite any, but especially those working in “less commonly studied” linguacultures and among their languagers, to contact us for more information.)

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language and Power edited by Ching-Ching Lin and Clara Vaz Bauler.

Language Use in a Multilingual Workplace

This month we published Domestic Workers Talk by Kellie Gonçalves and Anne Ambler Schluter. In this post the authors introduce the book and explain what inspired it. 

This study of Shine (a multilingual cleaning company) was inspired by the dearth of sociolinguistic work carried out in domestic labor contexts and blue-collar workplaces more generally. As Kellie had close familial ties to Magda, Shine’s owner, we were able to gain access to all employees (migrant women who speak Portuguese and Spanish) and several of Shine’s Anglophone clients who reside in an upper-class suburb of New York City. As such, we were able to talk to the company owner (Magda), all of her employees and several clients in order to better understand how communication is achieved in a small private business where European Portuguese serves as the company internal language despite the company’s geographical location in the US, where English is the dominant language.

Our study had a strong ethnographic component to it meaning that we were also able to observe how the company hierarchy was structured and how daily business was carried out. As both Kellie and Anne are speakers of English, Portuguese and Spanish (at different levels), we were able to witness first-hand how different languages and different language varieties were valued, mixed, and used among domestic workers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

At the same time, we were also able to observe the diverse, creative linguistic and embodied resources drawn on to facilitate communication among domestic workers and their Anglophone clients. Because Magda, the company owner, is a multilingual speaker, she often facilitated communication between her employees and clients thus serving as the main language broker of the company. This fact coupled with domestic workers’ ability to use both Portuguese and Spanish in Newark, NJ (where many domestic workers reside) diminished most domestic workers’ need and even motivation to learn English while simultaneously allowing Magda to control and micro-manage communication between her employees and clients. English was therefore not a prerequisite for employment at Shine.

Due to Magda’s professional background in finance, as well as her managerial and multilingual skills, we also investigated the complex power relations among her, her migrant female employees as well as her Anglophone clients. While we found Magda’s managerial style to be very direct and authoritative, she also had a very soft side to her with regard to both her employees and clients resulting in little turnover of her staff and a high demand for Shine’s cleaning services.

Overall, the book traces the story of Magda as a migrant domestic worker herself, who left Brazil in the 1970s to work as a live-in nanny for an upper-class Brazilian family in New Jersey up until the establishment of Shine in the mid 1980s. We collected data for this project beginning in 2011 until shortly before the book was published in order to provide readers with an accurate and up to date account of how Shine was created and successfully run until Magda’s retirement in 2019 shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic.

We believe our study adds to the growing body of research on language and domestic work by taking embodied sociolinguistics, posthumanism and emotional intelligence into account while simultaneously maintaining a critical perspective on multilingualism, the feminine gendered nature of domestic work as well as the inherent power relations between majority and minority language speakers, where issues of class, gender and citizenship prevail.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Exploring (Im)mobilities edited by Anna De Fina and Gerardo Mazzaferro.

Negotiating Identities, Language and Migration in Global London

This month we published Negotiating Identities, Language and Migration in Global London edited by Cangbai Wang and Terry Lamb. In this post the editors reveal what readers can expect from the book.

London as a global city has been a ‘contact zone’ of multiple flows of people, cultures and ideas from around the world. While there are numerous studies of individual migrant communities in London and the UK, surprisingly, so far very few have investigated the nexus between mobility, cities and languages in London across different migrant groups. This edited volume is an attempt to address this gap by bringing together contextualised and cutting-edge research on a wide range of London-based migrant communities. It seeks to bridge segregated research into migrant groups, stimulate intellectual dialogues between academic and migrant communities, and lay the groundwork for interdisciplinary and comparative research into migrants in London and beyond.

The publication is the result of the collective efforts of HOMELandS (Hub on Migration, Exile, Languages and Spaces), an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Westminster. Located in central London and with many of its members coming from different countries and being migrants themselves, since its launch in 2014, HOMELandS has dedicated itself to promoting theoretically informed, interdisciplinary-oriented and language-based research on migration and diaspora in the global context. As a superdiverse urban space and a ‘migration laboratory’, London has naturally become one of the major sites for HOMELandS research. Instead of treating the city as a static physical container or an abstract geographical location, we see it as an ongoing set of possibilities in which the city’s meanings and potential uses are negotiated and released by the activities of migrants as transnational urban dwellers. We pay particular attention to the creative agency of migrants who endeavour to reconfigure existing discursive categories and power relations and engage with the social and political (re)construction of place and identity. The book in a way defines who we are as a research centre and gives a glimpse of the future and potential of London-based research into migration and diaspora that we are doing and will continue to do.

Another distinctive feature, and contribution, of the book is its interdisciplinary ambition in unpacking the complex relations between migration, cities and languages. We use ‘languaging’ as the central concept to integrate relevant research on migrants in applied linguistics, performativity and critical heritage studies. We define ‘language’ in a broad and metaphorical sense, referring to various kinds of material and immaterial practices that give voices to individuals and communities, enabling them to hear and be heard, and to communicate. Three distinctive ‘language spaces’ are identified and used to structure the book. The first one is ‘metrolingual space’ where people engage creatively with cultural translation to represent identities and values; the second one is ‘performative space’ where people of migrant background resort to various art forms to articulate a sense of being and belonging and to search for empowerment; the third one is ‘heritagisation space’ where the diasporic past is remembered, treasured and transmitted to the public and to the next generation, not only through the medium of words but also the silent ‘talking’ of objects. These three ‘language spaces’ are by no means static and mutually exclusive. Rather, they interact with each other in generating valuable opportunities for identity negotiation and opening up new spaces for the future through the very act of languaging.

This book makes a compelling case for mutual constitutiveness of migrants and cities –the city is not external to the identities and belongings of migrants in the same way as migrants are not external to the fabric and the ethos of the city. Migrants and cities produce and reproduce each other through multiple forms of everyday and ongoing negotiations in the intersection of the global and the local. In addition, we hope the publication of this book could further promote ‘language-based’ or ‘language-sensitive’ research as a tool for data collection and ethnographic fieldwork, which is crucial for generating fresh and in-depth insights into the issues of identities, belonging and inclusion that bear broad implications for the studies of migration and societies in post-Brexit Britain and beyond.

Cangbai Wang

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Exploring (Im)mobilities edited by Anna De Fina and Gerardo Mazzaferro.

The Sheer Love Rwanda Project

Our author Martin Pütz recently got in touch with us about a project he’s involved in in Kigali, Rwanda and asked us if we might be able to help out with some resources. In this post Martin explains the project’s aims and how we were able to help.

Sheer Love Rwanda, founded by Alexis Simbayobewe, himself a former street child, is an educational institution run and organized by social workers who take care of the needs of 44 children and young people (7-18 years).  Some of the youths are in this situation due to the effect of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda on their families. These youths found themselves in a bleak situation many years after the events and had to choose the “street” as their only option in life. Sheer Love Rwanda has now effectively been able to break this vicious cycle by giving the children a new perspective on life and educational opportunities. Sheer Love Rwanda has also managed to find foster families in the neighborhood that have taken in the youths and freed them from their homelessness. The mothers/fathers, often with 5-10 children of their own, are very impoverished, but do their utmost to offer the children protection and care. The children now receive schooling in neighboring schools and are looked after by the social workers in the Sheer Love Rwanda facility, where they get educational instruction in the afternoons: Learning on the computer, reading, arithmetic, writing, etc. Games and sports complement the educational programme. The children access Sheer Love Rwanda during the school holidays as well.

Regrettably, there is a shortage of textbooks for primary and secondary school children regarding almost all subjects meant for primary and secondary education like reading, writing, and maths materials, natural and social sciences, arts, music, ethics, etc. Multilingual Matters  have made a monetary donation in addition to sending books so that teachers in Kigali were able to purchase textbooks and other useful learning materials. Sheer Love Rwanda will now be able to build up their own small library.

To find out more about Sheer Love Rwanda or make a donation, please visit their website. 

Happy New Year!

We’re starting to get back into the swing of things following the Christmas break here at CVP/MM and in this post we reveal what we’re looking forward to in 2024.

Anna

I’m looking forward to finally taking our much-delayed 2020 family trip to Japan. There’ll be no Olympics to see this year but I’m already excited about all the food, and we’re spending plenty of time planning our itinerary. Before then I’ll be diligently practising my Japanese so it’s less terrible than it was the last time I went.

Stanzi

In 2024 I’m going to expand my baking skills – I really want to make a perfect jam doughnut! I’m also hoping to plan a trip to New York to visit my uncle as it’s been far too long.

Tommi

This year I am very much looking forward to being in Finland at a time when bilberries will be ripe for the first time in many years.

Flo

One of my hopes for the new year was to adopt a cat, which happened just four days in, so I’m already feeling good about 2024! I’m also looking forward to making a trip to Tblisi in Georgia in the spring to visit a friend who’s moved there. I’ve never been but I’ve heard great things, so I can’t wait to explore!

Rosie

This year I’m checking off a longstanding travel goal and heading to New Orleans in March! I have been wanting to visit for a very long time so thank you to NABE 2024 for providing the perfect excuse. In what is almost a New Year tradition for me now, I have optimistically decided I have time to learn a new language and so I’ve signed up for some BSL evening classes. I also realised there are old interests I don’t enjoy often enough anymore, so I’d like to get back to playing the piano regularly and going to more gigs – starting with the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow this month!

Elinor

This year I’m planning to master bread baking. Although I’ve done a lot of cake and biscuit baking in my time I’ve never really made bread so it’s time to learn a new skill!