The Bloomsbury Round Table on Communication, Cognition & Culture - Multilingual Communication in Health and Social Care

The Bloomsbury Round Table on Communication, Cognition & Culture with a Masterclass is an annual, international event, jointly hosted by Birkbeck College and the charity Mothertongue, where researchers at different stages of their career are invited to present the latest work in the broad fields of Language, Communication and Cognition. Each year, the Round Table will have a specific focus, but the general theme will remain on the cultural dimensions of human communication and cognition.

The 2013 Bloomsbury Round Table will take place on 27th and 28th of June at Birkbeck College (Malet Street). The Thematic Focus will be on Multilingual communication in health and social care: Challenges for providers and users.

The last decade has seen increasing numbers of people moving across borders in pursuit of work, safety and refuge. An inevitable consequence of this is that there are many people accessing services, including health and social care services, who do not speak the official language of the country in which they find themselves. In London alone it is estimated that over 300 languages are spoken by schoolchildren.  This multilingual kaleidoscope is challenging to both the authorities and the users of this services. Official language support is provided but it is costly. Other forms of language support include bilingual staff interpreting on an ad hoc basis, volunteer members of the community working as interpreters, professional interpreters, and children interpreting for family and friends. The latter practice is called “Child Language Brokering” (Antonini, 2010; Morales & Hanson, 2005). Professionals prefer to use professional interpreters because of concerns about safety, misdiagnosis, patients’ dignity etc while clients typically prefer to use family friends or their children as interpreters. There are many strongly held views about the pros and cons of each of these forms of provision but so far there has been very little opportunity for these ideas to be aired under one roof.

Keynote Speakers

The Invited keynote Speakers at the 2013 Bloomsbury Round Table are:

Prof. Carmen Pena (University of Alcalá, Madrid) Researching Intercultural and Interlingual Mediation in health care

Dr Rachele Antonini (University of Bologna, Forlì) Unseen linguistic mediation in health and social care: The role played by child language brokers

Master class

The keynote speakers will give a master class on Friday morning, in which they will address the epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges that crop up in this area of research.

Abstract Submissions

The deadline for submission has now closed.

Registration 

Click here for the online Booking Form.

The event is free for Birkbeck students. Other participants will pay a fee of £20.

For more information: Dr Beverley Costa (beverley@mothertongue.org.uk) and Prof. Jean-Marc Dewaele (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk)