Distinguished Speaker Series: Equitable multilingualism

In the next talk in our Distinguished Speaker Series, we are joined by Dr Beverley Costa from the Centre for Multilingual and Multicultural Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

Dr Costa will share how she has engaged with the concepts of equitable multilingualism (Ortega, 2019) and linguistic insecurity in her practice as a psychological therapist.

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About the speaker

Dr Beverley Costa grew up in a multilingual and cross-cultural family. After qualifying as a psychotherapist, she set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) for multilingual clients. This service worked with over 3,000 counselling clients. Some chose to speak in English, some chose to speak in their heritage languages and some chose to speak in a mixture of languages including Arabic, Farsi, Polish Portuguese, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and Tamil.

In 2017 a new organisation, Pásalo (www.pasaloproject.org) was created to share the learning from 18 years of Mothertongue’s service. Dr Costa will illustrate how this has been achieved through training, supervision, publications, creative projects, research and products from research such as the Bilingual Forum for Therapists and Mental Health Interpreters as well as an online resource on multilingualism and mental health. Slowly, offerings of access to mental health support in people’s preferred languages are growing. These offerings can make a big difference in the lives of those whose linguistic needs are likely be ignored in the debates and the policies designed to address social justice.

Together with Jean-Marc Dewaele (Birkbeck, University of London) she won the 2013 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Equality and Diversity Research Award.

In 2021 she received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation grant to create a free online training course on multilingualism and mental health: https://www.pasaloproject.org/multilingualism-mental-health-and-psychological-therapy---course-content.html.

Her book Other Tongues - psychological therapies in a multilingual world was published in 2020. In 2023 she was appointed as a member of the Good Practice Steering Group for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She was also granted the title of Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Arts and Communication Design, University of Reading.

South Asian Heritage Month and focus on multilingualism

In the run-up to South Asian Heritage month, and in the final part of this session, Sas Amoah and Dr Suresh Nesaratnam from the Open University will take the opportunity to introduce our free Tamil taster course on OpenLearn and provide some insight and context into Tamil in the UK.