Moving image and looking

For my postdoctoral project, I worked with audio and audio-visual recordings of daily family interactions in and outside the home, extensive qualitative interviews, photography, published TV and press materials and other multimodal informal exchanges with differently positioned Polish-speaking migrants in Greater London and South-East England. Thanks to this project, I worked with film as a research technique and focussed on the dynamics of multiparty talk, embodied cognition and distributed agency. My work was part of the ESRC-funded Family Language Policy project (Birkbeck, IoE UCL, University of Bath), a multi-level investigation examining language ideologies and practices in transnational families with links to Poland, Somalia and China, but living in Britain (2017-2020).

In my work, I focussed on the situated coming together of human and non-human, corporeal, semiotic and material entities in everyday life. I worked with audiovisual methodologies and carried out ethnographic fieldwork in 10 families in Greater London, where at least one person exhibited some knowledge of Polish. As we were interested in the contemporary multiplicity of family configurations, I worked with families of different types: two-parent, single-parent, middle-class, working-class, Polish-Polish, mixed heritage, biracial, heteronormative, LGBTQ+, adopted, etc. In my ongoing work with over 100h of recordings, I have been investigating how contemporary changes in sensory modalities influence adherence to linguistic norms and sociolinguistic innovation in multilingual contexts. Using multimodal and discourse analyses, I have been analysing how verbal and non-verbal aspects of interaction, including bodily movement, use of gestures and objects were affected and affected other aspects of the physical space, objects, etc. as well as the assemblage of sociocultural and material infrastructures of the globalised world. 

My ongoing work aims to contribute to discussions on embodied cognition, non-standardised speech and scale-making. I work with multimodal analysis, which has resulted in a series of publications with Prof Zhu Hua.  In our work, we have tried to shift the analytical focus from distinct codes and additive models of structural location to semiotic-material processes in which people individually and collectively engage to create, use and interpret signs in globalised society. Our work on the weaving of transnational cultures and projects also involved ethnographic fieldwork in selected Polish organisations in London, and participation in team ethnographies with a focus on Polish, Chinese and Somali linguistic and cultural practices in public space in the UK (e.g. Calvert 22 Foundation, British Museum).