Researchers in Swansea University’s (LTI) are engaged in a major UK-wide research programme: “Cross-Language Dynamics – Reshaping Community”.
“Cross-Language Dynamics – Reshaping Community” is a four-year (2016-2020) programme, one of four within the Open World Research Initiative of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (OWRI). The programme is led by researchers at the University of Manchester (PI: Professor Stephen Hutchings) and involves 12 UK institutions.
The over-arching aim of the OWRI programme is to develop a new Modern Languages research paradigm by re-conceptualizing the relationship between language and community for the benefit of a more open world. The programme will investigate multilingual, transnational and translingual communities in diverse contexts, with diverse methods, in order to address questions such as:
• Do the languages we speak define the communities we align with?
• How can language community boundaries be made more porous?
• What are the ties and disjunctions between language and nationhood?
• What are the dynamics of community-building between top-down, state-driven or institutionally driven processes and grassroots actions?
Researchers at Swansea are contributing to the OWRI programme with work focused on generating new understandings of:
- formal and informal community interpreting, with specific reference to asylum seekers and refugees locally
- translingual cultural dynamics (e.g. border languages, literary translingualism)
- translingual politics (e.g. soft power discourses in the Arab world and Mediterranean space)
- translingualism and informal language learning on the university campus.
Information on Phase 2 can be found.