Language Acts and Worldmaking

'Language Acts and Worldmaking' argues that language is a material and historical force, not a transparent vehicle for thought. Language empowers us, by enabling us to construct our personal, local, transnational and spiritual identities; it can also constrain us, by carrying unexamined ideological baggage. This dialectical process we call 'worldmaking'. If one language gives us a sense of place, of belonging, learning another helps us move across time and place, to encounter and experience other ways of being, other histories, other realities. Thus, our project challenges a widely held view about ML learning. While it is commonly accepted that languages are vital in our globalised world, it is too often assumed that language learning is merely a neutral instrument of globalisation-a commercialised skill set, one of those 'transferable skills' that are part of a humanities education. Yet ML learning is a unique form of cognition and critical engagement. Learning a language means recognising that the terms, concepts, beliefs and practices that are embedded in it possess a history, and that that history is shaped by encounters with other cultures and languages. To regenerate and transform ML we must foreground language's power to shape how we live, and realise the potential of ML learning to open pathways between worlds past and present.
Our project realises this potential by breaking down the standard disciplinary approaches that constrain Spanish and Portuguese within the boundaries of national literary and cultural traditions. We promote research that explores the vast multilingual and multicultural terrain constituted by the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, with their global empires and contact zones in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Understanding Iberia as both the originator and the product of global colonising movements places Iberian Studies on a comparative, transnational axis and emphasizes diasporic identities, historic postcolonial thinking, modern decolonial movements and transcultural exchange.
Our research follows five paths linked by an interest in the movement of peoples and languages across time and place. 'Travelling concepts' researches the stories and vocabularies that construct Iberia as a cultural crossroads, a border between East and West, a homeland for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We examine the ideological work performed by the cultural semantics Iberia, Al-Andalus, and Sefarad in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew and ladino (Judeo-Spanish), from the Middle Ages to the present, in Europe and beyond. 'Translation acts' turns to the theatrical narrative, investigating how words, as performed speech and embodied language create a world on stage. Through translation, we travel across time and space, interrogating the original words and bringing them to our time and place. This strand exploits theatre's capacity to (re)generate known and imagined worlds. 'Digital Modelling as an act of translation' examines the effects of digital, mobile and networked technology upon our concept of 'global' culture, and what kinds of 'translation' are enacted as information enters and leaves the digital sphere in the context of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. 'Loaded Meanings and their history' demonstrates the centrality of historical linguistics to cultural understanding, by investigating the process and significance of the learned borrowings in Ibero-Romance. Such borrowings acquire 'loaded' meanings that reflect and shape people's attitudes and worldviews. Finally, the agents of language learning-teachers-are the focus of the fifth strand, 'Diasporic Identities and the Politics of Language Teaching'. This strand analyzes the life stories of native teachers of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan to identify the vocabularies and narrative patterns that help them make sense of and interrogate their professional and personal identities as transnational cultural agents in the UK.

Teachers and Students. Through our strategic partnerships, we will influence the professional development of teachers, contribute to thinking about the curriculum from primary to tertiary levels, develop learning materials and resources, and advise on appropriate assessment for the new approaches. Our research will raise awareness of issues faced by language teachers (involving teachers directly in the research) and enable them to better negotiate their professional identities. At university level, we will raise the profile of teachers in Modern Language Centres, seeking to remove hierarchies between research and teaching staff.
We will maximise our impact on students by working with partners who are dedicated to improving ML learning in London schools. We will provide enhanced student learning experiences, involve students in research, and raise students' awareness of the benefits of a ML degree. Students will take part in innovative widening participation activity, including theatre workshops that relate the research to their own experiences. At university level, first-year undergraduates (in the UK and abroad) will benefit from the development of a Global Iberias textbook that will demonstrate the importance of a global approach to ML.
Civil Society Groups. We will engage a wide variety of civil society groups in our work, in particular faith groups (including elderly people of faith) in London. These will engage with the research through workshops-including theatre workshops. The research will build on Vakil's earlier work on Islamophobia, engaging Muslim civil society groups in the UK and abroad (including Turkey) and ensuring that simplistic perceptions are challenged.
Cultural Practitioners. Our cultural impact will take the shape of cultural outputs (including theatrical performances, an art installation, and an exhibition on the re-imaginings and contemporary resonances of Al-Andalus). These will be generated at the intersection of research and creative practice, engaging sectors that are experiencing the realities of the issues raised by the research. The beneficiaries will be those involved in the creative practice (including teachers and students), as well as our collaborating galleries (including the P21 Gallery for Middle Eastern and Arab art and culture) and theatres (including the Gate Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre) and their audiences.
Business and Commerce. Our beneficiaries will include businesses and their employees. We will develop means of demonstrating the vital role of contemporary ML knowledge and skills for businesses in a global economy. Through the King's MLC, we will collaborate with professionals who are studying ML so that their language needs are better understood and met. The digital humanities strand will identify opportunities for closer engagement between cultural practitioners and the commercial sector in language-based research, in areas such as data curation, visualisation and publishing.
Policymakers: Our impact on policy debates will be maximised through our White Papers. We will influence ML teaching policy, raising the profile of language teachers and drawing attention to the challenges that they face. We expect other policy impacts in, for example, the area of the UK's digital infrastructure for ML research, benefiting both digital users and providers, and in the area of inter-faith dialogue and understanding.
The Public. We will demonstrate to the public the vitality of contemporary ML research through our open-facing research environment. Our website will involve the public in all aspects of the research and will host blogs, podcasts and public lectures. Social media will be used to actively seek out groups who might be interested in the research. Our partner BBC Mundo's extensive social network will enable us to disseminate our research across the Spanish-speaking world, and Mundo will also work with us on developing stories for media broadcasts.