Translingual Literacies as Acts of Affectual Solidarities-Creative Material Resistance

• In Event: 66.085 - Multimodal Methods and Meanings: Expanding Critical Understandings of Students' Lifeworlds Through Visual Artifacts

Abstract

In a dynamic, networked landscape of global citizenship characterized by diaspora, migration, immigration, and transnational political, economic, and cultural relations, a radical reorientation in multilingual/multimodal literacy practice is essential (Canagarajah, 2013; Horner et al, 2011; Lu & Horner, 2014). Despite the hold of linguistic purism and a privileging of print literacies in social and educational institutions, we increasingly see translingual texts emerge from linguistic, material, and affectual contact in everyday life, whether in writing, talk, or multimedia. Translingual literacies, texts and text processes reflecting fluid language use with other semiotic material, or what Canagarajah (2013) calls code-meshing, transgress pervasive linguistic assumptions and decenter hegemonic binaries among Standardized English, Standardized Written English, and “other” linguistic forms.
A translingual orientation highlights two key concepts: 1) communication transcends individual languages, instead languages and language varieties constitute and are constituted by one another; 2) communication transcends words and is entangled with diverse semiotic resources and ecological matter. It is this second conceptualization that I think with for this panel. I rethink language within paradigmatic concepts from posthumanist readings, particularly Pennycook's (2017) notion of spatial repertoires, to explore languaging as a production of linguistic, semiotic, affectual, and object togetherness. I rethink languaging as multimodal and entangled with material-discursive matter and explore how languaging shapes and are shaped by affects-bodies-objects-histories-narratives.
Animated by data produced from a year-long study in two Midwest United States English Language Arts classrooms, we will experience the translingual texts and processes that become as diverse youth share affectual solidarities oriented towards making for a better world. Theories of spatial repertoires inform this multimodal analysis and highlights the material and affectual aspects of translingual productions. I utilize strategic sketches to animate the translingual texts and text processes that emerged among culturally and linguistically diverse 6th graders through this multimodal process and will invite readers to experience the complexity and the cultural significance of the multimodal processes and products that become when classroom expectations of a proficient writer include the ability to improvise and become with diverse materials and meanings, not just to command “standardized written English.” This analysis also highlights how multimodal processes/products are not always the work of being and meaning, but about becoming and improvising in the moment.This data-theory encounter enlivens how treating language as a tightly knit system free of other semiotic and object resources distorts meaning-making practices and their resulting texts. I conclude by posing the methodological tensions encountered as Pennycook's (2017) work is put into conversation with posthumanist scholarship to enter into multimodal analysis, and consider the new possibilities of refocusing pedagogies/analytic gazes on the togetherness of language-material-discursive matter.

Author

• Angie Zapata, University of Missouri