‘This research strand, part of the ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’ project, funded as part of the AHRC‘s Open World Research Initiative (OWRI) initiative, is led by the School of Advanced Study’s Institute of Modern Languages Research (University of London).
The OWRI project consists of four major research programmes, funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The IMLR’s researchers are part of a consortium, led by Professor Stephen Hutchings (University of Manchester), which has been awarded £3.9 million to develop a large interdisciplinary programme of research titled ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’.
The aim of AHRC’s multi-million pound investment in its priority area of modern languages is to explore and foreground the central role that languages play in relation to key contemporary issues, such as social cohesion, migration, health, business and diplomacy. The initiative seeks to have a significant impact on the study of modern languages in the UK.
“The OWRI initiative aims to transform the discipline of modern languages and to find a new voice, a new vision and, above all, a new identity for languages.
The challenge for each of the successful four-year projects is to achieve all this through research which is more radically interdisciplinary than hitherto and more imaginatively collaborative with dynamic partnerships with other universities, with schools and, crucially, with non-academic organisations in the UK and abroad.”
– Professor Michael Worton, CBE, chair of the Open World Research Initiative
The consortium’s programme is structured into three interconnected research strands. SAS and IMLR-led research will focus on translingual communities, questioning language’s importance in community formation. Translingual communities transcend perceived language barriers by negotiating across and between languages and by maximising the community-creating potential of translanguaging, translation, multimodal communication and non-verbal or semi-verbal forms (music, visual culture, internet).
This strand is led by Professor Catherine Davies. Find out more about the people involved in this project by clicking here.
The team at the School of Advanced Study will work in collaboration with several universities in the UK and abroad, as well as non-academic organisations. Find out more about our collaborators here.
Case studies will investigate:
• Translingual minorities: Minority identities, nationhood and cultural memory
• Translingual modernities: Migration and global consumerism
• Translingual networks: Investigating affective regimes of online sociality in digital culture
• Translingualism in contemporary opera, music, theatre and film
Supported by:
