Examining conviviality and cultural mediation in arts-based workshops with child language brokers:

The concept of conviviality has usually been applied to contexts such as urban neighbourhoods of diversity (Gidley 2013; Lapiņa 2016; Valluvan 2016), and refers to what Gidley (2013) would term the ‘convivial turn’, or the notion of living together or coexisting in our daily social interactions (Wise and Velayutham 2013). The application of conviviality explored in this chapter concerns everyday encounters (Fincher et al. 2014), or what Amin (2002, 959) calls ‘the micropublics of everyday social contact’. ‘Micropublics’ are sites of (sometimes compulsory) conviviality, such as workplaces, schools (Neal et al. 2016), youth centres and community groups (Neal et al. 2015). In this vein, our lens of focus in this paper is on what Neal et al. (2016, 465) would describe as ‘extended encounters’, namely a series of arts-based workshops with students in a culturally and linguistically diverse school in London. The substantive focus of the research study on which this paper is based explored feelings of identity, belonging and cultural mediation among child language brokers. Child language brokers are children and young people who linguistically and culturally mediate between family members and officialdom (Antonini 2010). The arts-based workshops with our child language brokers, and their subsequent outputs, are the centre point for what Illich (1973) might term ‘tools for conviviality’. Our analytic endeavours explore the ‘autonomous and creative intercourse among persons’ (Illich 1973, 11), namely the young people taking part in the workshops, wherein there were possibilities to share, connect and interact. In exploring one of the arts-based workshops for this paper we ask, what role did the artist delivering the workshop have on the output, and how did that unfolding process reflect our research objectives?