De-localising Dialect

'De-localising Dialect' (DLD) is an interdisciplinary research network of international academics, artists, critics, linguists and writers. Its aim is to develop new creative and critical practices for and about vernacular language art, with a focus on dialect viewed and deployed against its own deep associations with geographic locality and social rootedness.

The network will address pre-conceived notions about the sited nature of dialect (i.e. that dialect cannot 'travel' as critical language but instead may only occur meaningfully in specific localised instances), and challenge how dialect "has been historically devalued and marginalised, especially in educational settings, as a central part of an ideology of language standardisation" (Ahmad: 2011).

DLD is aligned with the current AHRC theme of 'Translating Cultures', actively engaging with the theme's first key strategic objective, "to develop knowledge of the nature of translation as a process that occurs across different languages, cultures, generations, media, genres and sectors. This permits in particular an emphasis on exploration of the cultural dynamics of translation, as well as on analysis of its distinctiveness in relation to other processes of interpretation, transfer, imitation, transformation and exchange".

The network will run for 12 months, starting in April 2018. We will meet on three occasions across the 12-month period. Each network event will be led by the P-I and the Co-I, with three invited speakers from each of the interdisciplinary fields of art, literature and sociolinguistics - and will take place in three different non-academic locations, as follows:
The Common Guild, Glasgow
The Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast
The British Library, London

The network activities will employ a multi-disciplinary methodology. Each of the three workshops will take as its starting point the main methodological approach of one of the three disciplinary fields (i.e. art, literature, sociolinguistics) and apply it to one chosen item of study (which might be an art work, a text, a sound recording). The expert speaker from that field will lead a practice-based workshop which will equip participants in this method, thereby sharing knowledge and practical research methods. This process will be recorded, along with relevant additional materials will be made available via the project's website. Each workshop will be documented in video form and these files will be made available on the website (via Vimeo), so that the methodological processes of the workshop is made visible and utile for other user-groups. The findings in an accessible manner, through the website and associated -emailouts from the partner organisations.

Whilst the workshop attendees will be comprised of guest speakers and locally-based researchers, all network members will be in continued contact across the year-long project: this will be facilitated by the PI and Co-I.

DLD is an important and pressing project because it will develop new creative and critical practices for and about dialect, untethering and exploring dialect from geographical location.

Recent examples of feature articles in the national press lamenting the prevalence of 'International Art English' in public institutions writing on art and design (Andy Beckett's 'A User's Guide to Artspeak' in The Guardian, UK, 2013) and international specialist art journal (David Levine and Alix Rule's 'International Art English' in Triple Canopy, USA, 2015) demonstrate main-stream interest in this area; DLD seeks to harness and interrogate this interest.

Given our contemporary globalised writing cultures and the valorisation or otherwise of geographically rooted 'literary' or 'critical' forms of writing (as evidenced in the references outlined in the Academic Beneficiaries section of this application), this project has strong impact potential outwith of academia, in the following ways:

DLD will involve three non-academic partners, The Common Guild, Glasgow, The Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast and the Oral History Archive at The British Library, London, situated in diverse locations across the UK. The project will be publicised through these organisations' mailing lists and networks, and each workshop's content will subsequently be made publically available through the website as the research progresses. Informal agreements have been secured with these organisations to link with and publicise the DLD website; thereby facilitating a wider spread of audience.

These three partners will each benefit by increasing their knowledge in the interdisciplinary research area; broadening their contacts; learning new methods and skills; being able to do work / apply for funding they wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

In addition, the non-academic audiences associated with the organisations will gain insight, and crucially, methods which address and embody the uses of dialect. We envisage that such methods could be further applied in contexts such as reading groups, blog writing, criticism and institutional writing.

The network will gain from working with this three organisations because it will be able to test our the developing methods through the workshops in real time in the venues, feeding directly into the interests and challenges that suit organisations face in the use of dialect on an everyday level.