Translanguaging in the Age of (Im)mobility

TIM2023

Translanguaging in the Age of (Im)mobility
Fourth International Conference on Translanguaging
Dates: 12-14 June 2023
Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden

The aim of this conference is to highlight perspectives on translanguaging in both policy and practice across different arenas, with a special focus on mobility. In an age characterized by mobility, both physical (e.g., migration and travelling) and digital (e.g., diverse media), it is essential to explore the role of language and languaging. Questions of mobility are relevant in public institutions, including schools, workplaces, healthcare services, legal systems, and immigration services. Mobility across physical spaces (e.g., due to economic migration, love migration, refugee status) affects every level of the society, as evident in both societal and individual language use.

Different aspects of mobility, including post-migration processes, may be related to language awareness, language attitudes, language ideologies and policies, media discourse and social media, linguistic citizenship, linguistic landscaping, multilingual pedagogies and social justice. While translanguaging research has often been limited to the classroom, we see it as a useful concept and theory for contexts both within and outside of school, and especially feel that the translanguaging perspective offers new understandings of the mobility processes. Focusing on translanguaging in an age of mobility feels timely, appropriate, relevant, and exciting.

Conference programme

(Please note that minor changes may still be made.)

TIM2023 Conference Programme (pdf)

Book of Abstracts 

 TIM2023 Book of abstracts (pdf)

Plenary speakers

Suresh Canagarajah, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Cripping Translingualism

"Crip" from disability studies draws from connotations of fracture, brokenness, and imperfection to highlight how such conditions of vulnerability can be resourceful and generative of unconventional new possibilities. In this talk, I present interactions in both disability discourses and purportedly "non-disabled" contexts to demonstrate how vulnerability is at the heart of all communication. Drawing from the expansive communicative strategies and semiotic resources adopted for meaning-making in these contexts, I demonstrate how translingualism--and linguistics in general--can address a broader range of material, sensorial, embodied, and affective communicative practices and meanings.

Personal presentation of Suresh Canagarajah (psu.edu)

Gerardo Mazzaferro, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Turin, Italy

Exploring the practice of translanguaging within (im)mobility contexts: performativity, language, and discourse.

The focus of this talk is on translanguaging within non-voluntary and forced migration contexts from a ‘performativity’ or discourse-oriented perspective on subjectivity and identity work in interactions and social encounters. The attention is on how in and through translanguaging practices, refugees and asylum seekers are able to publicly and positively respond to conditions of invisibility, vulnerability and precarity undermining their claim to be recognized as agentive, resistive and intelligible subjects. I argue that translanguaging represents a theoretical and methodological framework and a practice capable of resisting and (re)configuring the discourse of refugees and asylum seekers as passive, vulnerable and unethical individuals, who are not able to create the terms of their subjecthood and identity. By drawing from a range of communicative resources, refugees and asylum seekers can carve a place for themselves in the concrete cultural and sociohistorical conditions that define their present as well as envision their future.

University of Turin (in Italian, unito.it)

James Simpson, Professor, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Belonging and mobility: A translanguaging perspective

Belonging – a person’s experience of identity in relation to affinity with a place, a space or a community – is challenged for people on the move. In my talk I explore the concept of belonging in contexts of mobility from a translanguaging perspective, drawing upon research in the UK and in Hong Kong. I first offer a personal view of the evolution of translanguaging as a theory of practice. With reference to two projects in the UK (Translation & Translanguaging and Migration & Settlement) I focus in particular on the notion of a translanguaging space, and how it can enable insights into belonging and its corollary, non-belonging. I then turn to my current work in Hong Kong, Navigating Belonging, a new project at the intersection of linguistic ethnography and creative practice. In collaboration with a partner support organisation, we are exploring experiences of belonging through narrative and participatory photography. I discuss data from the project’s first phase, with participants who are forced migrants from South Asian countries in Hong Kong. How do they define, find and negotiate their belonging? A translanguaging perspective enables our scrutiny of established yet inadequate understandings of belonging which rest on ideas of cultural and linguistic homogeneity.

Personal presentation of James Simpson (hkust.edu.hk)

Ingela Holmström, Associate Professor of Sign Language and bilingualism, Stockholm University, Sweden

Translanguaging in the context of deaf migrants – challenges and opportunities

As a group, deaf migrants are highly heterogeneous, having different language and educational backgrounds. Some have grown up with adequate sign language exposure while others have used mainly gestures and/or homesign to communicate. Some have received little or no education, while others have education up to the university level. When arriving in Sweden, deaf migrants have to simultaneously learn twonew languages, Swedish Sign Language (STS) and Swedish. Learning two languages simultaneously and developing literacy skills prove difficulties for those migrants with limited linguistic repertoires. Others, with multilingual backgrounds, show difficulties in differentiating between STS and Swedish.

In this presentation, some findings related to visually-oriented translanguaging in deaf migrant classrooms will be presented and discussed. For example, pedagogical strategies, such as chaining between two languages, appear to be both beneficial and aggravating, indicating that translanguaging is not always helpful for those with lesser linguistic exposure during childhood. Another finding is that migrants with multilingual backgrounds use translanguaging to a higher degree, indicating that linguistic skills in more than one language promote translanguaging. The findings show that translanguaging practices are fruitful for the language development of the migrants, but are also demanding, specifically in light of their diverse backgrounds.

Personal presentation of Ingela Holmström (su.se)

Line Møller Daugaard, Senior Associate Professor of Language Education, VIA University College, Denmark

Newcomer youth as educational and translanguaging subjects

This talk addresses issues of (im)mobility in the education of a specific group of students in a specific educational space, namely newcomer students with diverse linguistic backgrounds and migration trajectories at the intersection between lower secondary and upper secondary education in Denmark.
The talk draws on insights from a series of research projects focusing on newcomer youth in Denmark; all revolving around various forms of transitions between reception classes in lower secondary school and vocational education training (VET) institutions in upper secondary education. Not unlike the situation in other national contexts, the Danish VET system struggles with low enrollment and high drop-out rates. The focus on newcomer youth at the intersection of reception class and VET thus represents a tension-filled interaction between a group of students often constructed as particularly vulnerable or challenged and a part of the educational system typically conceptualized as crise-ridden.

In the talk, I explore newcomer youth’s negotiations of themselves as educational and translanguaging subjects at the intersection between reception class and VET. I track the newcomer youth’s mobility across physical spaces in the past and explore their experiences of mobility and immobility across educational spaces in their present life situation and in future aspirations.

Personal presentation of Line Møller Daugaard (via.dk)

Conference committee

• BethAnne Paulsrud (chair)
• Parvin Gheitasi
• Sofia Lindén
• Jenny Rosén
• Jeanette Toth
• Boglárka Straszer

Scientific committee

• Adrian Lundberg, Malmö University
• Andrea C. Schalley, Karlstad University
• Andrea Young, University of Strasbourg
• Anne Reath Warren, Uppsala University
• Annika Norlund Shaswar, Umeå University
• Åsa Wedin, Dalarna University
• Bridget Goodman, Nazarbayev University
• Carla Jonsson, Umeå University
• Colin Reilly, University of Essex
• Corinne Seals, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington
• Elena Tkachenko, Oslo Metropolitan University
• Eleni Griva, University of Western Macedonia-Greece
• Eowyn Crisfield, Oxford Brookes University
• Graham Hall, Northumbria University
• Gudrun Svensson, Linnaeus University
• Hadjer Taibi, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Haley De Korne, University of Oslo
• Joke Dewilde, University of Oslo
• Jonathan White, Dalarna University
• Judith Purkarthofer, University Duisburg-Essen
• Christina Hedman , Stockholm University
• Krister Schönström , Stockholm University
• Latisha Mary, University of Strasbourg
• Leelo Keevallik, Linköping University
• Lina Adinolfi, The Open University
• Linda Kahlin, Södertörns University
• Margie Probyn, University of the Western Cape
• Marie Källkvist, Lund University & Linnaeus University
• Naashia Mohamed, University of Auckland
• Natalia Ganuza, Uppsala University
• Päivi Juvonen, Linnaeus University
• Sovicheth Boun, Salem State University
• Susan Hopewell, University of Colorado Boulder
• Valentina Carbonara, University for Foreigners of Siena
• Zhongfeng Tian, University of Texas at San Antonio