'Language Acts and Worldmaking' argues that language is a material and historical force, not a transparent vehicle for thought. Language empowers us, by enabling us to construct our personal, local, transnational and spiritual identities; it can also constrain us, by carrying unexamined ideological baggage. This dialectical process we call 'worldmaking'. If one language gives us a sense of place, of belonging, learning another helps us move across time and place, to encounter and experience other ways of being, other histories, other realities. Thus, our project challenges a widely held view about ML learning. While it is commonly accepted that languages are vital in our globalised world, it is too often assumed that language learning is merely a neutral instrument of globalisation-a commercialised skill set, one of those 'transferable skills' that are part of a humanities education. Yet ML learning is a unique form of cognition and critical engagement. Learning a language means recognising that the terms, concepts, beliefs and practices that are embedded in it possess a history, and that that history is shaped by encounters with other cultures and languages. To regenerate and transform ML we must foreground language's power to shape how we live, and realise the potential of ML learning to open pathways between worlds past and present. Our project realises this potential by breaking down the standard disciplinary approaches that constrain Spanish and Portuguese within the boundaries of national literary and cultural traditions. We promote research that explores the vast multilingual and multicultural terrain constituted by the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, with their global empires and contact zones in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Understanding Iberia as both the originator and the product of global colonising movements places Iberian Studies on a comparative, transnational axis and emphasizes diasporic identities, historic postcolonial thinking, modern decolonial movements and transcultural exchange. Our research follows five paths linked by an interest in the movement of peoples and languages across time and place. 'Travelling concepts' researches the stories and vocabularies that construct Iberia as a cultural crossroads, a border between East and West, a homeland for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We examine the ideological work performed by the cultural semantics Iberia, Al-Andalus, and Sefarad in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew and ladino (Judeo-Spanish), from the Middle Ages to the present, in Europe and beyond. 'Translation acts' turns to the theatrical narrative, investigating how words, as performed speech and embodied language create a world on stage. Through translation, we travel across time and space, interrogating the original words and bringing them to our time and place. This strand exploits theatre's capacity to (re)generate known and imagined worlds. 'Digital Modelling as an act of translation' examines the effects of digital, mobile and networked technology upon our concept of 'global' culture, and what kinds of 'translation' are enacted as information enters and leaves the digital sphere in the context of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. 'Loaded Meanings and their history' demonstrates the centrality of historical linguistics to cultural understanding, by investigating the process and significance of the learned borrowings in Ibero-Romance. Such borrowings acquire 'loaded' meanings that reflect and shape people's attitudes and worldviews. Finally, the agents of language learning-teachers-are the focus of the fifth strand, 'Diasporic Identities and the Politics of Language Teaching'. This strand analyzes the life stories of native teachers of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan to identify the vocabularies and narrative patterns that help them make sense of and interrogate their professional and personal identities as transnational cultural agents in the UK.

This project will address the issue of under-representation of cultural difference in the British secondary school Drama curriculum by creating an open-access educational website of video resources to engage secondary school children with foreign-language plays. By targeting young Drama students and their teachers we will train future theatre-makers and audiences to appreciate stories from diverse contexts and empathise with culturally distant others. About 22% of the UK population in 2015 was either born abroad or a foreign citizen, however only about 3.8% of plays in British theatres every year are originally written in a language other than English and the British secondary school Drama curriculum does little to include non-English/non-British material for students to engage with linguistic and cultural diversity through theatre. This alarming representation gap must be addressed and supporting teachers in choosing plays in translation would be an effective way to change the status quo. Reducing the representation gap between curriculum requirements, students' cultural backgrounds and availability of teaching resources is even more pressing when we think about international/British schools overseas offering CGSEs, A-Levels, BTEC and IB qualifications in Drama to a multicultural, multilingual and multiracial student body. From my extensive consultation period with over twenty teachers working in the UK and overseas, I have concluded that there is a clear intellectual and academic gap, and an urgent ethical call, to expand education resources in this area to foster dialogue on cultural and linguistic difference in English-speaking schools offering Drama both as an assessed subject and/or as an enrichment activity. The project builds on the research and expertise acquired through my award-winning AHRC Leadership Fellowship - entitled 'Translation, Adaptation, Otherness: "Foreignisation" in Theatre Practice' - focusing on the representation of cultural and linguistic difference in theatre translation. Investigating the reasons behind the disappointing number of translations in British theatre repertoires, the PI identified secondary school Drama education as a potential area of impact to foster more engagement with, and representation of, cultural and linguistic difference on English-speaking stages in the future. Increasing representation of non-English languages and culture on English-speaking stages is of paramount importance to foster understanding among communities in multicultural societies, such as the UK, but also in the US, where translations of foreign-language texts tend to be rare and immigration high. Included in the website will be newly commissioned filmed extracts of five plays in the original language and two English translations, in order to highlight how translation strategies can have an impact on the production. The videos will be entirely new and curated for the project, featuring a professional cast. We will also produce and include on the website: film interviews with key practitioners working in the field; extensive contextualisations of the plays by academics and theatre-makers; and teaching resources clarifying how to integrate the resource into the GCSE, A-Level, BTEC and IB curricula. Collaborating with far-reaching theatre organisations such as the Gate, London, which has been keen a champion of theatre translation, and the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, a venue which focuses on young people, the project will create accessible educational resources for pupils to engage with foreign-language plays i as investigated in the PI's Fellowship project. The Project's Advisory Board includes five Heads of Drama working in secondary schools in England and theatre managers from the Gate, the Gulbenkian and the Royal Court Theatre. We will employ experienced academics and teachers to deliver the resources. These resources will encourage long-term mind shifts and internationalisation.

According to the British Theatre Repertoire Survey, in 2013 only 3.2% of all the plays performed in the UK were in translation, and yet according to the Migration Observatory, 12.5% of UK residents are foreign-born, only 80% of the population identifies as 'white British' and hundreds of languages are spoken in the country's schools, especially in London. The lack of diversity in British theatres is highlighted in a 2014 Arts Council England report, stating: 'It is vital that the arts and cultural workforce becomes more representative of the society it serves' (p. 1). This two-year project argues that translation has a key role to play in fostering equality in the performing arts. In order to make British theatres attractive to, and representative of, a more diverse audience, this project proposes to further, and widen awareness of, existing debates on the ethics and politics of translation among practitioners, industry professionals, translators, audiences, students and scholars. At a time when immigration is at the centre of the political agenda and nationalist, anti-European sentiments are on the rise, theatre translation and the representation of otherness on stage can offer a public arena for intercultural dialogue. The Fellow aims to carry out research and public engagement activities that place the politics of translation and the representation of otherness through theatre in the public eye. The research will investigate questions such as: What are the current dominant translation/adaptation strategies in theatre? What constitutes a 'foreignising' approach to theatre translation/adaptation? Can the same approach work for different kinds of sources? What are the effects of 'foreignisation' on performance and mise en scène? How is a 'foreignising' translation draft negotiated by theatre-makers in the rehearsal room? How do audiences respond to it? Translation scholar Lawrence Venuti champions the translation strategy he calls 'foreignisation', as a as opposed to 'domestication', in that the former tries to limit the degree to which the unfamiliar is forcibly turned into the familiar, silencing cultural difference. Despite the recent academic interest in 'foreignisation', theatre studies still lack a debate on what a 'foreignising' approach to stage translation would mean for text and performance, and whether theatre - as opposed to literature - requires a distinctive approach. The question of how current theatre training and ideological beliefs influence translation practices in British theatres is also underexplored, and so is the notion of a 'foreignising' approach to adaptation. Meanwhile, the theatre industry tends to take 'domestication' for granted in an attempt to appeal to the widest possible audience, dismissing 'foreignisation' as a clumsier, riskier, yet untested alternative. The Fellow and her collaborators will select three plays for translation by playwrights based in Europe and writing in Polish, Spanish and French - representing three of the most spoken European migrant languages in the UK - and organise practice-as-research workshops with professional performers and creative collaborators, led by scholar-translators, to test 'foreignising' strategies. The Fellow and her Research Associate will carry out qualitative research during and after the creative process with performers and audiences. Each workshop will present their outcome to the public in the form of rehearsed readings at the Gate Theatre in London in May and June 2016. Each performance will be followed by a post-show debate. Taking place in the run-up to the in/out referendum on Britain's membership of the EU during what will be one of the most crucial political debates of recent times, the Fellow aims to widen the reach the project by working with our consultants, Firehouse Creative Productions, to develop one of the plays into full production for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017.