Lam, W. S. E. & Warriner, D. S. (2012). Transnationalism and Literacy: Investigating the Mobility of People, Languages, Texts, and Practices in Contexts of Migration. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(2), 191-215. (original) (raw)
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This special issue of Papers in Applied Linguistics brings together eight articles and an interview that provide a wide range of perspectives on the topic of transnationalism. Much research in applied linguistics highlights the growing importance of globalisation and transnational mobility, but often takes these processes and their effects to be self-evident and self-explanatory (BRIGGS; MCCORMICK & WAY, 2008). As such, this special issue addresses the ways in which transnational movements of populations, linguistic practices, ideology, knowledge and capital shape educational policies and practices related to language. It is concerned with migration, internationalisation of educational provision, student mobility, and global communications. The present text and the majority of the articles that follow are in English, yet each author is inevitably engaged in transidiomatic practices (JACQUEMET, 2005) through work that engages with variations, and mixes of, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Haitian Creole, amongst other linguistic forms. The authors also share a commitment to critical scholarship that promotes democratic schooling and society, questioning the commodification of education and reproduction of oppressive social relations by highlighting issues of power and ideology, including those involved in the geopolitics of north-south relations. Below, we provide some context on the two interrelated types of circulation that will be addressed in the subsequent papers: that of heterogeneous linguistic formations and that of culturally diverse populations. As guest editors, we write from, and into, contrasting locations within these global movements. Brazil is a country with small contemporary migratory movements, but a long and brutal
Glocalism in Literacy and Marriage in Transnational Lives
Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 2009
In this paper, I examine the ways in which young Yemeni and Iraqi immigrant and refugee women and men strive to become literate as they negotiate transnational spaces. I investigate the social and literate connections they forge as they search for the appropriate spouses. Transnationalism, the phenomenon of living locally with global connections, demonstrates both the local and global tensions of refugees and immigrants as they interact in shared cultural sites. Moreover, transnational literacy, as described in this paper, is evoked as a means to sort through particular literacy practices that simultaneously foster status and knowledge and explain the youths' negotiation of home and school lives. Two cases are presented to illustrate how literacy implicates a set of social practices that are conflictual in their transnational locality and in their glocality.
1995
Viewing from a distanceas a British social anthropologist and as a literacy researcherthe growth of interest in fami:; literacy in the United States (now being followed by the United Kingdom), there seem to me to have been two basic approaches or philosophies of education involved in the movement. One of these, and the dominant one until recently, has been the cultural deficit model; the other is the culturally sensitive model. Within the cultural deficit model, educators, politicians, programme directors, and fenders have seen the family, and links between generations in the family, as a way of achieving educational goals that schools were unable to achieve. At its most extreme, this involved using family literacy schemes to infuse school and middle-class val-I hope that it will receive wide attention and will help to connect not only generations but also cultures and classes in the diverse literacy environments we now inhabit.
Transnational Identity and Migrant Language Learners: The Promise of Digital Storytelling
As technology enables migrant learners to maintain multi-stranded connections with their countries of origin and settlement, they engage with the world with transnational identities that negotiate a complex network of values, ideologies, and cultures. How teachers and peers recognize that migrants come with specific histories, knowledges and competencies shapes migrant learners' investment in learning. By building on their transnational literacies, the language learning classroom can be a Third Space which acknowledges and affirms their fluid, multidimensional identities. Digital storytelling, by allowing them to share their personal histories, their stories of migration and assimilation, and the material conditions of their lived experiences, holds great potential for enabling migrant learners to be fully invested in their transnational identities and to claim their right to speak. rom the moment migrant families or individuals cross borders through varying immigration categories-as investors, professionals, refugees or temporary workers-the trajectories of their assimilation will vary. Driven by diverse goals, serving different needs of nation-states, and equipped with varying levels of economic, cultural and social capital, immigrants, sojourners, and migrant workers occupy different social locations in their adopted or host country. With the rapid advancement of technology, the structures of migrant socialization have changed, as have patterns of migrant movement and employment. Through more affordable travel costs, mobile communication devices, social media, and online connectivity, migrant learners are increasingly able to navigate more seamlessly between their countries of origin and of settlement, and pursue their lives with a greater sense of transnationalism
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This chapter reviews research on the relation of literacy and identity in the context of transnational migration and changing linguistic and communicative landscapes with online connectivity. In particular, we focus on the ways that youth of migrant backgrounds use digital and online media to construct networks and affiliations with diverse cultural and language practices. The studies we review have provided lenses into how youth of migrant backgrounds draw from multiple linguistic and semiotic resources to represent themselves, how they navigate participation in diverse communities and networks that span national borders, and how diaspora youth blend their cultural heritage and affiliation with transna-tional youth culture in online participatory practices. The youths' digital practices indicate that they are orienting to different cultural discourses and practices coming from both local and translocal spaces, across their countries of origin and settlement, as these discourses and practices are accessed, remixed, and circulated on new media platforms. We propose that, at a broader level, these practices point to the ways in which people maneuver differentiated social spaces within and across countries, how people create their own (cultural and historically informed) pathways through them, and in the process reconstruct their understanding and relationships across these spaces. These processes of traversal and reconstruction of social spaces have important implications for further research and educational practice that seek to enhance people's mobility in a global world.