Kate Pahl
The phrase ‘language as talisman’ emerged from a shared interest in the ways in which language can operate as a source of resilience. It was a way to raise questions about the uses and meanings of language and literacy that did not draw entirely on an academic discourse and would therefore provide a more open space for discussion across University and Community contexts. We wanted to explore ways in which young people could gain insights into their use of language and link this to the literature. The uses of dialect, gesture and everyday multimodal communication (Kress 2010) were particularly important in articulating young people’s agency in language. In the project we linked youth workers, academics, community workers, artists and poets in a collaborative ethnographic project to explore the nature of language, dialect and everyday literacies in community contexts including a youth service, two schools and a park.
We saw the concept of ‘Language as Talisman’ as a provocation to help us construct a set of encounters with youth workers, families, young people, elders and educators. The encounters were not just between the people and the disciplines but also between ideas and forms – poetry, film, visual art, ethnography, meta-language, language and literacy. We saw these encounters as ‘learnings’ which then iteratively informed both our practice and the review.
Language is linked to power, and to discourses of power (Gee 1999, Fairclough 2001). We were able to use the image of the ‘talisman’ to open up this idea. This was particularly useful with the youth service, who described this approach as a way to engage young people in activity where their voices were heard. They made a film with young people using a drama company as a facilitator, about their interactions with parents and social workers.
We also realised the relationship between language and power in a material form. We explored the idea of language as material through making artwork with sand, a visual exploration of the ideas that spoken language being invisible creates our reality. This provided the roots of developing our connection to language and its personal and group ownership and heart-felt connections. We asked children in schools to make talismans that contained their favourite stories and sayings. Poetry, sayings, oral stories, drama, films and written and materialised texts all mattered to the people involved in the project. We placed the concept of language as power alongside material and craft based activities which brought to the fore how children and young people made sense of language. The work generated the space for new dialogue and created a space for us to consider language use from a different perspective.
The collaborative ethnographic side of the project enabled all of the project team to realise their concepts of ‘language as talisman’ in different ways – from Deborah Bullivant’s work with older members of the community on family sayings, to Marcus Hurcombe’s work with young people and a theatre group to help young people articulate their sense of anger and powerlessness using language. We could surface these understandings through the collaborative ethnographic methodology which meant we all participated in the making of meaning using the provocation of Language as Talisman. This way of working was collaborative, with not one particular way of understanding the phrase being prevalent but all were valued and important to the project.
From these encounters we developed some outcomes that have been useful to the communities we worked with, including a book, ‘Reunion’ written by three girls in Rawmarsh, a film about why language is important for the schools as well as a website: http://languageastalisman.group.shef.ac.uk/) which held together all of these outcomes.
Taken from:
Language as Talisman Final report by Kate Pahl, Deborah Bullivant, Hugh Escott, Jane Hodson, David Hyatt, Marcus Hurcombe, Steve Pool and Richard Steadman-Jones (AHRC Connected Communities Scoping Study report 2013)
References
Fairclough, N. Language and Power, 2nd edition, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2001.
Gee, J.P. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis Theory and Method, London, Routledge, 1999.
Kress, G. Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication, New York: Routledge, 2010.
Doing collaborative ethnography 