About the event

How do we experience language(s) in everyday life? How are our identities shaped through our engagements with language(s) in public space? How do people make the new from the everyday and the banal?

In this presentation I share some current ideas relating to visual arts, creative practice and linguistic landscapes (visible languages), with examples from different research projects (Bradley et al., 2015-2017; 2019-2021) which explore everyday experiences of language(s) or Spracherleben (Busch, 2012; 2014) through and with creative methods. I show a series of images of artworks created by young people working with a visual artist in response to the linguistic landscapes of Manchester, UK. Drawing on a developing framework for creative inquiry and applied linguistics (Bradley & Harvey, 2019; Harvey & Bradley, 2021), which considers language-focused research with, into and through the arts, I discuss what an arts-based approach to linguistic landscapes might look like, might be, and might bring to our understandings of everyday languaging and everyday creativity. This paper links directly to ideas I am developing with Louise Atkinson, delving into art history, art education, language education and creative inquiry in co-produced research.