About the project
The project runs from November 2025 to July 2026 and is funded by the CCM Small Grant 2025/26.
Background
Maximalist portraiture is designed to be implemented as part of an original research agenda. I aim to make both an empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of the multifaceted intersections of language and place. I will achieve this with insights from the lived experiences of Colombian LGBTQ+ (s)exiles in the UK.
Methodology
I mobilise the concept of ‘Spracherleben’ – the lived experience of language (Busch, 2017). Using this approach, I bring together two distinct conceptual understandings of language.
1. Language as Resource
This explores individuals’ linguistic repertoires (Busch 2017) as closely related to:
- cultural background, and
- migration trajectory.
I pay attention to the role played by specific linguistic resources in the negotiation of individuals’ sexile experience.
2. Language as Narrative
This emerges from an understanding of migration as “self production”. This is achieved through the stories migrants tell about their journeys (Gray & Baynham 2020). Narrative is a productive semiotic site in which I can observe:
- the construction and negotiation of anticipated futures (Pérez Milans, 2025),
- understandings of place (Browning, 2025), and
- home-making practices (Calic et al., 2024).
The innovative maximalist portraiture method which this study sets out to test is therefore designed to capture participants’ ‘Spracherleben’.
The concept of ‘language portraiture’ does have some currency in studies of sociolinguistics (see e.g., Busch, 2018). However, the proposed study breaks new ground by
- engaging critically with this notion, and
- taking seriously the arts-based implicature of portraiture as a research methodology.
The study tests proof-of-concept for maximalist portraits not only as a way of capturing narrated experience. It also examines them as an ethical mode of representation which humanises an often-objectified community. In doing so, it explores the portrait’s ability to wrap participants in a relationist ethic of care (Taylor, 2005). Furthermore, I see the maximalist, ‘aesthetics of abundance’ (associated with Nietzschean thinking – see e.g., Elion, 2001) as:
Team
UCL project team members
Non-UCL project team member
Contact us
Centre for Applied Linguistics
Department of Culture, Communication and Media
UCL Institute of Education
University College London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Image
Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.