Chronotopes of Transnational Literacies in the Digital Practices of Two Youth Migrants

• In Event: Theorizing Time and Space in Empirical Research: Potentials and Possibilities

Abstract

Studies have shown the role of transnational digital communication in fostering adolescents’ feelings of social connectedness (Author & Colleagues, 2019), transnational ways of knowing and identity positionings (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019; Kim, 2018), and the circulation of knowledge and relational resources in migrants’ social networks across countries (Dryden-Peterson, Dahya & Adelman, 2017). Given the significant and positive role that transnational relationships may play in youths’ development, we explore in this paper the space-time dimensions of digital literacy practices that contribute to people’s sense of connection across geographical distances. We examine how social connectedness is semiotically constructed through time-space framing among two Chinese youth who had recently migrated to the United States.

Our theoretical framework draws from concepts of chronotope and scale informed by the empirical scholarship of transnational literacies of migrant youth and families. The concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) points to how configurations of time and space invoke value-laden ideas of what subject positionings and actions people can take up as well as imagine for themselves and others. While social domains in society are spatially differentiated and stratified by power and recognition, through everyday interactions and narrative people can bring together events and practices across multiple time-space scales to make sense of their worlds (Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016; Author & Colleagues, 2021). In this study, we use a chronotopic lens to understand how youth depict their transnational social relations within particular time/space frames. We consider how their spatiotemporal framing may involve multiple social and geographical scales that affect the transnational perspective and subject positioning of the youth.

This case study is drawn from a larger research project that incorporated observational and survey methods to learn about how youth of Chinese and Mexican heritage engaged with digital media to communicate across countries. Participants were immigrants or children of immigrants attending an urban high school in the U.S. Midwest. Among the youth of Chinese descent, most transnational communication involved peers of similar age who were in China or had moved overseas. We identified episodes in our interviews and home observations when the two youth described their interactions with their peers. Drawing on discourse analysis of time-space relations in narratives (Karimzad & Catedral, 2018), we analyzed how the youth created a sense of co-presence and proximity, oriented to particular locales, and connected multiple scales of practice as they narrated their interactions with peers from China. For example, through the shifting of pronoun deictics and other narrative features, one youth portrays herself through multiple overlapping chronotopes related to the academic and social experiences of her peers in China as well as peers in diaspora contexts across three countries. We also observed instances when the two youth indexed and layered social practices (and ideologies) across countries in developing comparative time-space references for their schooling experiences and in imagining their responses to nationalism and xenophobia. We draw implications for how spatiotemporal ideas and framings operate as semiotic resources for developing ways of knowing and being across borders.

Authors

• Eva Lam, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Jue Wu, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author