Exploring the Semiotics of Space and Time in Youths’ Narratives of Migration and Transnational Belonging

• In Event: Methodologies for Exploring and Creating Narratives of Migration and Transnationalism in Various Contexts

Abstract

Purpose: This presentation draws from participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) of a language arts curriculum unit developed by the co-authors that aimed to support high school students in thinking about migration across multiple contexts as students developed storytelling projects of a migration figure of their choice. In view of dominant and pernicious discourses of migration that rest on racialized and exclusionary logics of national belonging, we explore how youth mobilized time-space movements as semiotic resources to construct transnational positionings and engage with the phenomena and politics of migration.

Theoretical Framework: We extend the educational literature on the spatiality and temporality of the migration stories that youth tell (e.g., Dutro & Haberl, 2018; Sepúlveda, 2011) by developing a theoretical framework that connects the semiotic concepts of chronotope and scale (Christiansen, 2017; Lam et al., 2021) with theories of border-crossing (Anzaldúa, 2015). Chronotope refers to the time-space configuration of discourse, and how the invocation of particular times and spaces support and make visible aspects of people’s personhood and their agency or possibility of actions. We are interested in how people create chronotopes that link events and practices across multiple time-spaces, as “this power to shift” may serve to disrupt exclusionary boundaries and create new ways of seeing oneself and others (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 84).

Method: Our teacher-researchers team implemented the first iteration of the curriculum in a Sophomore English class from Dec 2022 to Feb 2023. The data for this presentation comprised the multimodal stories (written texts, illustrations, and google slides) of three students of diverse ethnicities, interviews with the students, and students’ in-progress writings. We asked the question: How do the time-space configurations in the youths’ stories create transnational positionings and geopolitical references to engage with dominant ideologies of migration, national belonging, and border enforcement?

Findings and Significance: Through thematic narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008) of the youths’ stories and inductive analysis of other data, we identified distinct chronotopes across the three stories that afford particular vantage points for understanding migration. One youth’s hand-painted drawing and written narrative juxtapose her neighborhoods in the Philippines and the U.S., defining her migratory movement as “double presence” and centering the time-space of her Filipino hometown to portray an alternative childhood and challenge assimilative forces in the U.S. Another youth’s story weaves together multiple experiences of crossing the Mexico-U.S. border across timescales to express her perspective on migration, creating interlocking conceptions of her immigrant mother, her transnational family ties, and binational surveillance and militarization of the border. Our third focal youth traces the history of his family’s exile from Chile to the history of the Pinochet military dictatorship, situating three generations of his family in the contexts of Chile’s national politics and geopolitical relations with the U.S. These multiple chronotopes of migration show distinct and complementary ways to explore border crossing and cultivate transnational identity and agency among the youth. They suggest the affordance of thinking from particular places and spatiotemporal contexts in positioning self and others and historicizing practices of migration.

Authors

• Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University

• Patricia Delacruz, Evanston Township High School

• Gautam Singh Bisht, Northwestern University

• Tori Y. Choi, Northwestern University