Angela Gayton gives an overview of the photographic exhibition run by the MEITS team as part of the Being Human Festival last year:
The 2017 UK-wide Being Human Festival ran between November 17th and 25th, and as part of this, the MEITS team held a photography exhibition in each of its four partner cities (namely, Belfast, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Nottingham). The exhibition theme, “Understanding our Multilingual World”, was met through images submitted by members of the public, bringing to life visual representations of what languages and multilingualism mean to them.
The shortlisted images of individual and societal multilingualism were taken not only in participating cities, but also locations spanning the globe, including Canada, Greece, Israel, New Zealand and South Korea. Visitors were invited to reflect individually or collaboratively on common themes that they saw emerging from these diverse images of multilingualism. Their reflections sparked lively conversation with the MEITS team, on universal issues relating to multilingualism in varied global contexts.
We were also delighted to have three of the exhibited photographers attend the Cambridge event; they gave even more in-depth perspectives on their multilingual images, in conversation with Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Principal Investigator of the MEITS project (listen here). The photos of the contributors interviewed at the Cambridge event are below:
With thanks to the IMLR for its support.
Angela Gayton, Research Associate MEITS team, University of Cambridge