The New Speakers’ Studio

The New Speakers Studio is a series of cultural ‘instruments’ conceived and made by Deirdre MacKenna for the EU COST Action New Speakers Network which is a group of researchers, policy makers and stakeholders from 28 countries working together on the first study which explores the challenges and opportunities involved in becoming and being understood as a new speaker of a language in the context of a multilingual Europe.

The Network has sought to understand the potential social tensions that emerge from unequal access to participation of new speakers in Europe; these inequalities pose challenges to integration, social cohesion and economic collaboration, as well as to the full participation of territorial and immigrant minorities.

Deirdre and Bernadette O’Rourke, Chair of the New Speakers Network, first met at one of the regular GRAMNet collaboration development meetings in Glasgow in November 2016 and their fluent dialogues began to map out ways which could bring valuable academic research to the attention and use of people learning to be speakers of languages which are new to them.

Deirdre devised The New Speakers’ Studio to represent the experiences new speakers have when negotiating society. In doing so, her aims are to increase and improve representation of new speakers in the academic arena, and also, create situations in which new speakers can see and engage with these aspects in contextualised public situations; a process to externalise one of the many intangible aspects of our everyday lives.

Deirdre invited Agata Urbanska, Brian Thunder, Daniele Sambo, Hanneke Scott-Van Weil, Leena Nammari, Miren Manias, Nadifa Essa and Nina Bacos to contribute two things to be filmed and photographed by cinematographer Gordon James:

• an object which they own which they associate in any way with language, and
• their experiences and opinions about being a ‘New Speaker’ of the English language in Scotland today (they did this ‘to-camera’ in filmed interviews with Deirdre MacKenna).

The objects are utilised in the The New Speakers’ Studio as a visual-substitute, or proxy of an image of each interviewee in order to enable the audience not to be distracted by any associations they might make about age, gender, ethnicity etc.

From the images and interviews (a new research archive), Deirdre created The New Speakers’ Studio which comprises printed booklets and posters, films and photographs. These are presented in site-specific installations / interventions designed by Deirdre in order to invite audiences to consider the issues involved; rather than enabling us to hear new speakers’ voices, The New Speaker Studio is a representation of the experiences new speakers encounter during their language trajectories.