Speaker: Prof. Prue Holmes

Time: 10:00-11:30

Date: July 5, 2017 (Wednesday)

Venue: Academic Lecture Hall, Fourth Floor, BFSU Library

Language: English

 

Prof. Prue Holmes is Reader and Director of Postgraduate Research, School of Education, Durham University. She is also Adjunct Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland, and Guest Professor, Zhejiang Wanli University, Ningbo, China. She researches, teaches, and supervises graduate students in intercultural and international education, and languages and intercultural communication. Prue is a co-investigator on the project “Researching multilingually at the borders of language, the body, law and the state” (AH/L006936/1), on the Jean Monnet network project “European Identity, Culture, Exchanges and Multilingualism” (EUROMEC), and she was co-investigator on the European project “Intercultural Educational Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers”.  She chairs the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) and convenes the annual CULTNET conference at Durham University.

 

This lecture will explore how language is at the heart of who we are, how we understand ourselves, and the challenges we face when our language, and others’ languages, are placed under pressure and pain, often due to (forced or economic) migration, marginalization, and conditions of precarity. The discussion is informed by theories of languaging and linguistic incompetence, translanguaging and ecological language pedagogies. In educational terms, this context of heightened multilingualism clashes with the ontology of “one language-one culture-one nation”, now much contested contemporary language and intercultural communication research. However in post-Brexit Europe, discourses against diversity and difference have re-emerged. This lecture discusses the possibilities and opportunities afforded by migrating languages and their users by celebrating the multilingual classroom.