Maggie Kubanyiova (CLER) in conversation with Angela Creese, University of Stirling

Language & Culture at Leeds
studies connections between how we communicate and the cultures and worlds we create. Central to our research is an interest in what happens when these worlds collide. We ask, ‘How do people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, worldviews, past memories, present practices and future visions meet and engage with their differences?’ Language and Culture brings together linguists, artists, philosophers, educators and others to examine how these aesthetic and ethical questions play out in the practical tasks of communal meaning making across diverse domains of social life: in schools, workplaces and families, in markets and service encounters, in music and dance rehearsal rooms, theatres, museums, art galleries, and in local communities and digital spaces. We use a wide range of analytical tools of linguistics (especially ethnography of communication, discourse analytic approaches, narrative inquiry, oral history, corpus linguistics and philosophical inquiry) to produce understandings of what it takes to build inclusive civil societies.
Join us for an informal conversation about questions relevant to Language & Culture and to find out more about members’ current and future research projects.

Angela Creese is Professor of Linguistic Ethnography in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling. Her disciplinary home is interpretive sociolinguistics and she draws on theories and methodologies from linguistic anthropology to investigate language in social life. Angela has led several large Research Council Grants (AHRC and ESRC) on multilingualism in city and school contexts and has been advancing ideas on heteroglossia, translanguaging and superdiversity as ideological orientations to social and linguistic diversity. Her research draws on empirical data gained through ethnographic observations, audio and video recordings of interviews and everyday interactions to which she brings an ethnographically informed discourse analytic approach.

She has published extensively. Her publications include The Routlledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity (with Adrian Blackledge), Linguistic Ethnography (with Fiona Copland), Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy (with Adrian Blackledge, 2014, Springer); The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (2012, with Marilyn Martin-Jones and Adrian Blackledge); Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective (with Adrian Blackledge, 2010, Continuum); English as an Additional Language (with Constant Leung, 2010); Volume 9: Ecology of Language, Encyclopedia of Language and Education (with Peter Martin, 2009); Teacher Collaboration and Talk in Multilingual Classrooms (2005) and Multilingual Classroom Ecologies (with Peter Martin, 2003). Her 2010 article ‘Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classrooms’ with Adrian Blackledge (Modern Language Journal) has appeared on the journal’s most cited list over the last 9 years.  She is committed to engaging with stakeholders beyond the academy and has worked closely with a range of arts, heritage and cultural organizations, and education groups.