My research focuses on how language and literacy are understood in everyday contexts, and how individuals negotiate or subvert institutional conceptualisations of language and literacy. This often involves taking an interdisciplinary approach to research, and working with children and young people to explore how they play with language and literacy in classrooms, creative writing workshops, and informal contexts. I also have significant experience working with external partners on collaborative community engagement projects, through research, or as part of public engagement activities.

In my work I draw on a range of research methodologies and disciplines. Including stylistics, sociolinguistics, literacy studies, ethnography, co-production, arts-based methods, and education studies. I have experience undertaking research with children and young people in school, youth service, and creative arts contexts (Escott 2021, and Escott, Christie, Hodson and Bullivant 2021) and developing new research methodologies to analyse co-produced research data (Escott and Pahl 2017, Escott and Pahl 2019). I also have experience working with external partners (e.g. artists, youth workers, teachers etc.) as part of co-produced collaborative community-engagement research projects including as a researcher on the AHRC Language as Talisman (AH/J011959/1),  and Co-Producing Legacy (AH/L013185/1) projects. I am particularly interested in  developing my capacity to engage in anti-racist and social-justice work, as well as methodologies and perspectives that challenge the norms and values of institutionally-situated ways of knowing.  My research is also now focussing on the ways in which digital and physical environments are becoming increasingly intertwined in everyday life, and the ways in which individuals negotiate how these digital spaces are mapped onto, or interact with, their physical environments, including in Virtual Reality and online multiplayer games. This includes examining material interfaces, the numerous kinds of meaning-making and literacy practices that support these activities, and the ways in which narratives inform how people think about environments, their identity, or shared moods/atmospheres. Most recently, I participated in the the ESRC/AHRC funded UK-Japan “Location-Based VR Research Network” (ES/S014136/1 - PI: Yamada-Rice) where I collaborated with researchers from the Royal College of Art, VR developers from the production company Hashilus in Tokyo, and video games developers from Dubit in Leeds

Specialist areas of interest:

New Literacy Studies
orthography
dialect representation
working-class literature
socio-linguistics of writing
collaborative research
arts-practices