LINCS colleagues participated in the annual flagship conference of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) at Aston University in September.

PhD student Aurora Zhang’s presentation, Visualising self in translanguaging space: Children’s creative representations in a Chinese community school, discussed how arts-based research methods can shed light into children’s identity negotiation and performance. Aurora also joined the Research Involving Children Special Interest Group.

Professor Claudia Angelelli presented her work on Empowering impoverished communities through critical thinking. The talk focused on the linguistic resources deployed by a collaborative project’s research team in Portuguese, English and Spanish while working with three vulnerable populations in deprived metropolitan areas in Goiânia during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr Michelle Liao’s presentation, Staging the unspeakable: multimodal narratives of sexual violence in memorial museums, examined how memorial museums narrate the trauma of female victims—experiences often regarded as too intimate, shameful, or painful to be publicly articulated or commemorated. Through a multimodal examination of interpretive texts, exhibition layout, circulation paths, object sequencing, and material choices, the paper explored how women’s testimonies are curated as both linguistic narratives and spatial experiences. By analysing the interplay between language, space, and affect, the paper argued that memorial museums do not simply represent trauma; they stage conditions under which the “unspeakable” becomes publicly narratable and collectively felt.

Eva Hanna and Professor Katerina Strani presented their DET-funded project on Gatekeeping access: English language proficiency testing and displaced applicants in Scottish higher education. The talk argued how English language proficiency (ELP) assessment can act as a structural barrier for displaced university applicants when designed without the user in mind and discussed the face validity of newly developed fully online tests.

LINCS is applying to host the BAAL conference in 2028, and we hope to be shortlisted. Wish us luck! Results will be communicated in January 2027.