Listening Without Borders: Creating Spaces for Encountering Difference

Maggie Kubanyiova is Professor of Language Education at the University of Leeds where she is Director of the Centre for Language Education Research. Her research interests cut across sociolinguistics, education, philosophy and arts. She has brought this interdisciplinary perspective to inform her research on language teachers’ development in multilingual settings, language learning opportunities in classroom talk, ethical dimension of multilingual interaction, moral and political dimensions of language teacher identity, and research ethics. Her co-edited special issue of the Modern Language Journal (with Anne Feryok; 2015) forged new pathways in the language teacher cognition research, her book Teacher Development in Action (Palgrave, 2016) proposed a novel theoretical framework for understanding language teachers’ change and her Motivating Learners, Motivating Teachers: Building Vision in the Language Classroom (Cambridge University Press, 2014; co-authored with Zoltán Dörnyei) was highly commended for the HRH Duke of Edinburgh Award. Her current research is concerned with creating spaces for transdisciplinary working and engagement across sectors to tackle issues of societal polarisation. She is leading an Arts and Humanities Research Council project, Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other (ETHER), which examines ways in which people of diverse worldviews, backgrounds and future visions engage with their differences.

Parinita Shetty is a scholar and a children’s book author who has worked with young people in India in a variety of contexts. She completed her PhD from the University of Leeds which examined intersectionality and public pedagogy in online fan communities of popular media. She launched her own fan podcast Marginally Fannish as part of her research methodology.