Research project
Leeds Voices: Communicating superdiversity in the market
- Start date: 1 October 2015
- End date: 30 September 2016
- Funder: British Academy / Leverhulme Trust
- Primary investigator: Professor Paul Bagguley
- Co-investigators: Professor Janet C.E. Watson, Professor William Gould, Dr Sara Gonzalez, Dr Yasmin Hussain, Dr Elisabetta Adami, Dr Serge Sharoff, Mr Simon Popple, Dr Penny Rivlin, Mr Tom Jackson, Rianna Harree
Value
£28,000
Description
Funded by the British Academy / Leverhulme Trust
Phase 1 (October – December 2015) of the Leeds Voices project was funded by the Sadler Seminar Series.
This project examines the embodied multilingual/cultural accommodations that people of different ethnicities make in their interactions at Kirkgate Market. A key objective is to explore how far different multilingual public spaces generate contextually-dynamic and demotic forms of everyday civility, something rarely highlighted in dominant discourses about cohesion. This will be addressed through four primary research questions:
- To what extent can Kirkgate Market be seen as a place of superdiverse forms of accommodation, which includes, but extends beyond a focus on ethnicity, at an historical moment when inter-ethic conflict is discursively situated as the norm?
- How is linguistic accommodation to others expressed? How does it transform and create its own forms of civility? How does it work across related languages?
- How do non-linguistic forms of cultural accommodation relate to linguistic forms? What is the significance of such strategies for trading?
- How are these micro-social behaviours shaped contextually by the more general sort of time-space location that Kirkgate Market represents?
Publications and outputs
- Adami, E. (2018) ‘Shaping the Social through the Aesthetics of Public Places: The Renovation of Leeds Kirkgate Market’ in Frida Forsgren & Elise Seip Tønnessen (Eds.) Multimodality and Aesthetics, London: Routledge Series in Multimodality, 89-112
- Adami, E. (2018) ‘Multimodal sign-making in today’s diversity: The case of Leeds Kirkgate Market’, in A. Sherris and E. Adami Making signs, translanguaging ethnographies: Exploring urban, rural, and educational spaces. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 36-54
- Adami, E. (2018) Shaping Public Spaces from Below: The Vernacular Semiotics of Leeds Kirkgate Market. Social Semiotics (online-first publication 11 Oct 2018). doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1531515