Embodied Semiosis of Transnational Trajectories in Collaborative Community Translanguaging

• In Event: Expanding the Notions of "Multilingualism" and "Multimodality" by Examining Multilingual Practice Across Various Educational Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores collaborative translanguaging (García & Li, 2014) and transmodalising (Newfield, 2014) practices which flexibly draw on and shift across varying linguistic and multimodal resources. It takes an ecological, post-human approach that considers interactions of all inhabitants in the semiotic ecology. Challenging the predominant focus on the individuals’ multilingual competence in translanguaging scholarship, this paper examines how human agents, their biographies, varying semiotic resources, and material objects collaborate to build collective, transnational community repertoires and semiosis by proposing the concept of community translanguaging.

Theoretical Framework
An ecological, post-human perspective (Canajarajah, 2018; Pennycook, 2018; Toohey, 2018; Van Lier, 2010) frames this study in order to understand the complexity and richness of semiotic collaboration among transnational people, their diverse biographies, semiotic resources, and the material affordances of spatiotemporal conditions. Semiotic ecology refers to the dynamic space of interaction that draws from all the possible meaning-making resources for communication. This paper employs the notion of “community repertoire,” which is not tied to the local, physical location, but instead comprises records of mobility with dispersed, transnational life trajectories and resources (Blommaert & Backus, 2013). With this notion, it explores the emergence of dynamic semiotic assemblages or embodied semiosis through community translanguaging among all that participated and collaborated in the transnational semiotic ecology.

Methods and Data
Data for this paper were selected from two qualitative case studies to examine collaborative transnational semiosis building. Focal data include archived digital interaction of transnational youths in online communities and video messaging for diverse audiences, and multilingual family storybooks and observation notes from an after-school family literacy project with families from diverse racial, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. Data analysis employed a conventional social semiotics approach (Kress, 2000, 2009; Newfield, 2014) to consider affordances and modal shift across all semiotic modes (textual, audio-visual, gestural, spatial, tactile, and interactive). In addition, the analytic process also engaged with post-human ecological thinking (Pennycook, 2018) with a focus on the process and product of collaborative assemblages that emerged in each semiotic ecology.

Results and Significance
Data analysis captures (1) how semiotic assemblages were embodied by weaving the youths’ and families’ individual and collective repertoires built from their transnational life trajectories across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries in each space; and (2) how such trans-semiosis is inherently a collaborative and transbordering interplay and material embodiment among diverse linguistic resources, communicative modes, and lived experiences across varying spatiotemporal contexts. Community translanguaging, thus, moves translanguaging scholarship beyond individual competency towards collaborative endeavor and spatial embodiment (Canagarajah, 2018). Pedagogically speaking, as informed by the relational ontology of post-human, ecological thinking (Kuby & Rowsell, 2017), this paper informs how such trans-semiosis can be enacted in classroom space in ways that reflect creative interactions among the diverse trans-mobile trajectories, spatiotemporal memories, feelings, resources, identities, and trans-semiotic creativity. This study adds insights to the recent conversation on the trans-perspectives in pedagogy and research of languaging (Hawkins & Mori, 2018), illustrating an ecological, post-human analysis of embodied semiosis by transnational, mobile agents.

Author

• Sujin Kim, George Mason University