Creating Social Justice Spaces Through Translanguaging

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Fourteen
  In Roundtable Session: Transformative Pedagogical Spaces: Critical Literacies, Racial Literacies, and Translanguaging in and Beyond the Classroom (Table 3)

Abstract

Sociolinguists have advanced the concept of translanguaging as the marshalling of a multilingual speaker’s communicative repertoires to both communicate with a multilingual audience and signal the speaker’s identity repertoires. This paper is about the ways in which translanguaging in non-educational contexts can create opportunities for social justice practice and disrupt dominant paradigms about hegemonic monolingualism and about deficit identities of English Language Learners. Based on a multi-case study about Asian immigrant student activists, the discussion describes a socio-political context for multilingual student organizing and then focuses on experiences of one student leader in negotiating language, identity, and power relations. The study provides examples of individual agency in “enacting translanguaging for social justice” (Garcia & Leiva, 2014) and creating translanguaging spaces.

Author

• Mary Yee, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author