Examining Cultural Knowledge Mediation by Child Language Brokers through Arts-based Practice: Narrations of Identity and (Un)belonging

Child language brokers are children and young people who translate and interpret for family members in a range of spaces (e.g. banks, schools, hospitals) following migration to a new country. These spaces act as cultural contact zones (Hermans, 2001), where cultures meet, are negotiated and confronted (O’Sullivan-Lago & Abreu, 2008). This paper explores the narratives around identity, belonging and cultural mediation shared by child language brokers via the use of arts-based practice.

Little is known about the process of cultural mediation of knowledge values and norms by these young people and how this may impact on their identity and sense of belonging (Crafter & Cline, 2012). Partly, this is because attempts to verbalise how cultural knowledge is linguistically mediated are very challenging. Arts-based research offers a potential mechanism for capturing narrations of cultural mediation and identity. Building on this, the paper draws on data from a UK based study of young interpreters (aged 12-16) from 3 London schools which used traditional social science methods (interview & questionnaire) alongside art-based ones. Here we focus on 2 arts-based workshops: i) radio podcast production and ii) sculpture with 20 young people.

Our child language brokers describe the integral connection of language to their sense of belonging and ability to access to particular cultural and social spaces. Brokering was found to help in their understanding of their own culture, the host culture and other cultures better. They also report on the challenges of cultural mediation and highlight particular examples of incidents where confrontation, humour and embarrassment result when different cultures meet. We also think about the challenges and benefits of using art to examine cultural contact zones. The study importantly provides information on how children and young people can play a key role in cultural mediation, integration and intercultural contact in multicultural contexts.