The factors of everyday globalization, the relocalization of mediascapes and technoscapes in multilingualism from below

Our panel addresses how people living in different parts of the world are involved with multilingualism from below in relation to factors of everyday globalization (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2015). Our main objective is to better... [ view full abstract ]

Our panel addresses how people living in different parts of the world are involved with multilingualism from below in relation to factors of everyday globalization (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2015). Our main objective is to better understand how the notion of 'relocalization' - language users create their own and novel communicative diversity while recycling from available resources (Dovchin et al. 2015) -  develop further complex communicative practices. In particular, we seek to examine the massive role of media-/technoscapes (Appadurai 2000) and their creation for transnational possibilities of cyber culture, media and technology resources for mobility that many people have come to possess. We seek to address the main questions:  

- How, why and to what extent do people in different areas of the world relocalize varied transnational media/technoscape resources within their everyday multilingual practices? 

We pull together data from multiple areas of the world, bringing together several themes of wide contemporary interest: How Twitter is increasingly being relocalized within the sociopolitical domain, creating a new kind of media literacy; how the prosaic features of an English text can be relocalized within the Japanese traditional drama Noh in the context of Japanese  EFL students; how the relationship between online and offline space may be relocalized and further develop the term metrolingualism; how the objects such as dried fish and mobile phones are relocalized and create the idea of  ‘actants’ in a Bangladeshi-owned corner shop in Tokyo; and how the relocalization of various semiotic resources in Bangladeshi advertisements become important factor for the emergence of new meanings in relationships between multiple media and technology modes. 

References:  

Appadurai, A. (2000). Globalization and the research design. Public Culture, 12(1), 1-19.  

Dovchin, S., Sultana, S., and  Pennycook, A. (2015). Relocalizing the translingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, 1(1), 4-26.  

Pennycook, A., and Otsuji, E. (2015). Metrolingualism: Language in the City. London: Routledge.