“The varicultural, translanguaging, and beginning with the small” - a talk by Professor Adrian Holliday

This will look at how a seamless varicultural flow of diversity runs across the boundaries of cultures, both big and small, that are constructed within it. Using a reconstructed ethnographic description of a hospital waiting room and an interaction with a health professional, I will look at how ‘us’-‘them’ culturalist stereotyping and native-speakerism is imagined when we ignore the varicultural flow and begin with the concept of separated cultures, and resisted when we look around us and begin with the small details of this flow. Translingualism is part of this resistance, helping to return us to the natural cultural and linguistic hybridity of the past, which is still around us.

Find out more about Adrian Holliday