Activity Plan Consultant, The Dialect & Heritage Project

Our project will get people of all ages using and talking to each other about dialect. We will harness the power of dialect and local heritage to increase people's wellbeing and sense of pride in self, place and community across England. Working with a diverse range of partners and stakeholders from different sectors and complementary projects, libraries, museums and schools, we will deliver an ambitious programme of interactive public engagement events, co-created outreach activities, exhibitions, and creative commissions, informed by cutting-edge dialect research, and building on the successes of our recent work and assets. We will develop participation and education opportunities (citizen science dialect detectives, dialect surveys, digital storytelling, volunteering, training and skills-building, making and transcribing oral history recordings) for people from a range of backgrounds and age groups, including hard-to-reach audiences and those experiencing isolation. Responding to partners' needs and opportunities (including digitising complementary partner & community content), we will create accessible, inclusive digital and physical resources, informed by ongoing research, enabling people from all walks of life to explore and share their dialects and heritage on their own terms, stimulating dialogue between young and old, rural and urban communities and increasing sense of belonging. We will develop portable pop-up dialect 'handling' materials and kit; education, reminiscence and wellbeing resources and sharable toolkits, including training as appropriate and interactive web content. Touring exhibitions and pop-up events will enable us to bring the riches from the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) - an important national dialects collection at the University of Leeds - to communities and to venues, large and small, across the country, where they can be complemented by material held by partner organisations.