Designing “Culture Songs” as Migratory Texts: Exploring Transnational Exchanges in Digital and Multimodal Spaces

• In Event: Humanizing Literacy Research: Mapping Exchanges in Adolescent Reading and Writing Spaces

Abstract

We know from current research that it is inadequate and risky to define literacy as a finite set of competencies in a globalized and digitized world (Brutt-Griffler, 2007; Gee, 2004; Lam, 2006). To this end, this research aims to display ways in which urban youth who might resist traditional reading and writing practices in the classroom engage new forms of composing and text design in transnational contexts. Drawing from three years of ethnographic data, this study focuses on a group of Filipino British youth or the “Pinoys” as they like to refer to themselves. It explores how they navigate belonging across diverse communities. Multimodal and discourse analyses methods will be highlighted to display the ways in which the Pinoys facilitated social language development through transnational exchanges in digital and multimodal spaces. Such an approach makes visible how the Pinoys, their ideas and their texts migrate across discourse communities (Bakhtin, 1981; Rampton, 1995). By shifting the study of literacy from bounded contexts to exploring migratory patterns across spaces, I seek to examine how the Pinoys, their ideas, and their texts are crossing the discourses of schools, homes, neighborhoods and workplaces (Bakhtin, 1981).
Studying youth languages and literacies as everyday practice sheds light on the social phenomenon of culture, resistance and identity as a lived experience. Specifically, I study the transnational exchanges of the Pinoys to better understand how they: (1) extend practices of code-switching, code-alteration and language crossings to navigate movement across diverse social, cultural and linguistic spaces (Rampton, 1995); and (2) speak to issues of power and inequity prevalent in assimilationist traditions and deficit models of schooling (Freire & Macedo, 1987). How do language and literacy shape the social identities and cultural practices of the Pinoys? How might understanding the Pinoys’ social identities contribute to new conceptualizations of language and literacies research?

To address the aforementioned questions, emphasis will be given to the multimodal transcription of noisy and moving musical data that one of the Pinoys, Aziatik, engaged in his daily life. I will examine how Aziatik designed multimodal texts such as “culture songs” that circulated across transnational spaces, (Author 1, 2011; Kress, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Hull & Nelson, 2009). Lyrics, Mp3 files, digital editing observations, semi-structured interviews and live performance observations will be analyzed. These multiple data sources will be mapped to illustrate the ways in which Aziatik’s design of multimodal texts made possible his expression of social identities and development of linguistic variety as situated across different contexts.
Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogics and Rampton’s (1995) crossings are applied to understand the social nature of youth literacies as a living linguistic resource. This framework opens possibilities for a multimodal analytic approach that examines how participation in transcultural textual production extends the everyday functions of language and literacy among the Pinoys. Thus, this study has implications for broadening understanding of literate acts that urban youth perform beyond the classroom and for expanding what counts as literacy in our global and digital worlds.

Author

• Myrrh Domingo, University of London