Chinatown across timescales: Ethnographic approaches to linguistic landscape

Please join us for our next OCI public talk where we are delighted to welcome Dr Jackie Jia Lou from Birkbeck, University of London, as our guest speaker.

The talk will explore the 'slices of time' embedded in the linguistic landscapes of Washington, D.C., and London’s Chinatowns. Dr. Lou will share her experiences of immersing herself in the daily life of these communities to understand the perspectives and practices of those who live and work there. By unraveling these temporal layers, she aims to illuminate the unique historical processes that have shaped each Chinatown.

About the speaker:

Dr Jackie Jia Lou is currently Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research has so far focussed on language and the city, particularly through the lens of linguistic landscape. She has published widely on the topic, including a monograph titled The Linguistic Landscape of Chinatown: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography (Multilingual Matters, 2016). More recently, she received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the project ‘Language change and urban transformation in Treaty Port Shanghai, c.1842-1943’. Dr Lou is an Associate Editor of the journal Linguistic Landscape and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

To register to attend, please sign up on the Eventbrite page here.

To read the Chinese version of this event, please click here.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Update 28/10/24: The recording from the talk is now available below. The transcript is available here. This also includes some questions which Dr Jackie Jia Lou has kindly answered after the event due to us running out of time on the day.