Multilingual Heritage: Challenging monolingual memorialisation

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The project aims to investigate the construction of memorial heritage sites through the deployment of local plurilingual repertoires in postcolonial settings, namely Algeria, Cape Verde and Eritrea. Drawing on scholarship relating to critical language policy, Linguistic Landscapes and geosemiotics, the research will explore the role of memory places such as museums, memorials and monuments in addressing issues of social inequality, and foreground to what extent multilingualism challenges the legacies of colonial experiences that can have a significant impact on prosperous and peaceful communal living. This project therefore engages directly with two AHRC priority areas, namely Heritage and Modern Languages, to bridge the gap between existing AHRC projects, all of which currently link multilingualism with education rather than heritage. This network will bring together researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers from countries which are simplistically described in linguistic terms according to the standard language spoken by the former colonial power. The network will pay critical attention to how multilingualism in memorialisation can address voicelessness by bringing sociolinguistic approaches to bear in questions of heritage. Although the University of Liverpool participants will bring to the network their expertise in multilingualism and language policy, one of the aims of the collaboration is to negotiate research perspectives, practices and aims in order not to impose western-centric methodologies and epistemologies on the investigation of the relevant settings. By embracing the principles of Southern Theory, the project will be grounded in local modalities of memorial narratives and discourses, and integrate alternative experiential universes. This is the ethical stance that informs the project, starting from a first 'agenda setting' meeting of the participants. This will ensure co-creation of shared objectives and outcomes in the respect of local priorities and needs. There are three planned workshops in Africa, each of which is immediately preceded by a half-day session in the memory place used as a case study and backdrop to the roundtable discussions. This half-day practical session draws on Blackwood and Tufi's expertise in Linguistic Landscape research in order to record and analyse the memory places, involving not only the core network members but also the practitioners and policy-makers. This activity not only shares the latest developments in best practice for data collection and analysis but also provides the material for the evidence-based policy recommendations. The collective analysis of the material recorded in the three memory places facilitates the transnational dimension of the project, drawing on the range of approaches that have evolved in each of the national traditions. The core network members co-lead the three workshops, with a different member of the Advisory Board at each workshop, in order to maximise input from different academic perspectives, using local interpreters to avoid the replications of models of academic interactions which perpetuate the dominance of standard language - and in particular English - in scholarship. Local practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers will attend and contribute actively to the three workshops, each of which will take place in the respective memory places. As such, this network will provide a new narrative on the management of heritage, privileging multilingualism so as to reduce inequalities as well as to develop a shared arena of research.