Language, Music and Power: The cases of three translingual singer-songwriters and women of Tio’tia:ke / Montreal

• In Event: The Writingworld: Power Dynamics in Language, Literacies, and Pedagogies Across Contexts

Abstract

This presentation is about the language practices embedded within the cultural production of three non-blinded, woman-identifying, Montreal-based singer-songwriters and musicians: Noé Lira, Willows, and Ultra K. This presentation centers and brings to light how processes of symbolic creativity and cultural production (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, 2020) made space for the three women of this study to engage with translingual dimensions of their language practice that historically have been excluded from dominant educational spaces (Canagarajah, 2012; Kalan, 2021; Kalan, 2022). The research questions anchored this study were: 1) What language practices are embedded in the cultural production of the three singer-songwriters of this study? and 2) How do these language practices demonstrate the ways in which these artists perceive, navigate, and challenge dominant, often monolingual, artistic, educational, and linguistic cultures? Writingworld theory (Presenter 1), grounded this project by highlighting the importance of looking beyond text, in this case song lyrics, to investigate language and text production within its sociocultural, and power-relational contexts. To do so, the presenter carried out an ethnographic multiple case study (Baxter, 2008; Hancock; 2021) drawing upon multiple sources of data: a) observations and field notes conducted during live concerts and other encounters; b) embodied knowledge; c) in-depth, 190 minutes, semi-structured individual interviews, and c) artful elicitation, and d) a collection of publicly available information located online i.e., songs, lyrics, music videos, recorded interviews, articles, biographies. Data was transcribed, manually coded, and analyzed through multiple qualitative phases that are in line with multi-case study traditions (Creswell & Poth, 2016). Three major findings of this study center the affective, spiritual, and material dimensions of the three women’s translingual practices and demonstrate loving ways to navigate and challenge dominant cultural and linguistic cultures. This presentation contributes to scholarly discussions highlighting the need to center and make space for organic language and literacy practices of raciolinguistically minoritized students whose practices have long been pushed to the sidelines of dominant educational cultures.

Author

• Bianca Gonzalez, McGill University