Transnational Dreams, Translanguaging Tongues, and the Making of Qazaqness in Los Angeles’ Little Kazakhstan

• In Event: Translanguaging, Multimodality and Affect in School and Community Learning Ecologies

Abstract

Objective

This paper attempts to understand how Central Asian Kazakh immigrants in Southern California rearticulate identity and belonging through community-based heritage language education.

Theoretical Framework
Guided by the frameworks of Culturally Disruptive Pedagogy (San Pedro, 2018) and Language Ideological Assemblages (Kroskrity, 2021), the paper analyzes how competing language ideologies and semiotic practices shape a fluid yet politicized decolonial vision of Qazaqness (Kamalova, 2025) within a diasporic, community-based learning ecology.

Data sources
The study examines multilingual curriculum design and recordings of naturally occurring classroom interactions across three distinct courses offered at a Kazakh cultural center in Los Angeles drawn from a larger ethnographic study of weekly interactions at the center conducted over three months.

Method
Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (C. Goodwin, 2018; M.H. Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2012) the study examines multilingual curriculum design and recordings of naturally occurring classroom interactions across three distinct courses offered at a Kazakh cultural center in Los Angeles.

Results
Each class reflects a distinct ideological orientation: one course enforces Kazakh linguistic purity as a mode of reclaiming language sovereignty; another draws on embodied performance and semiotic resources grounded in traditional dombra arts (Pennycook, 2017); a third integrates translanguaging through poetry and visual Oyu art (Blackledge & Creese, 2017; Li & García, 2022). These pedagogical approaches are expressed not only through language, but also via spatial arrangements, visual displays, and pedagogical norms. Kazakh, Russian, and English function as morally and ideologically charged resources: Kazakh is valorized as the core of ethnic and cultural revitalization; Russian, once dominant, is simultaneously used to build coalitional ties across Central Asian diasporas yet distanced from Kazakh heritage reclamation due to its colonial legacy; and English is leveraged to negotiate a new Kazakh/Central Asian American identity within a transnational frame. The paper argues that community teachers, by deploying culturally disruptive pedagogies, frame classrooms as spaces where decolonial aspirations are not only taught but lived and negotiated. The paper also pointed out that children’s agentive participation often complicates or challenges adult expectations, revealing how Qazaqness is co-constructed, contested, and reimagined in practice.

Significance
This study contributes to our understanding of how decolonial heritage language education is designed and enacted in diasporic contexts. It reveals how transnational experiences—shaped by cross-state colonial histories, national imaginaries, and the creative everyday practices of multilingual speakers—inform the ways that Central Asian immigrant communities navigate identity, language learning, and belonging within superdiverse urban environments.

Author

• Munira Kairat, University of California - Santa Barbara