This panel puts together papers by transnational researchers on the historical conditions of migrant flows, individual educational trajectories of migrants and their children, and their multilingual, multicultural ‘worlding’ practices (Goh, 2014). In many of these scenarios, migrants and their children have to learn to dwell with ‘others’ while at the same time they have to learn to deal with being positioned as ‘others’. As Goh (2014) puts it, the ‘tragedy of multiculturalism’ in many countries lies in their legal, political integration of immigrants without sociocultural integration. State-defined and capital-driven multiculturalism and multilingualism often operate with hierarchies of languages and ethnicities. How can a non-elite multilingualism provide alternatives to language and ethnic hierarchies embedded in global, capital-driven multiculturalism and multilingualism? What kinds of research and critical sociolinguistics and cultural projects are needed to contribute to the possibility of creating a kind of egalitarian ‘multicultural, multilingual, worlding practice’—a form of non-elite, non-state-defined, non-capital-governed multilingualism which embraces ‘practices that infuse our arbitrary cultural lives with new things from cultural others in ambiguously and open-ended poetic ways to enable us to dwell and be at home with the complexity of the world’ (Goh, 2014, p. viii)? In this panel, critical sociolinguists join hands with critical education studies scholars to present on how migrants and their children navigate their paths and invent their emplaced translanguaging (García & Li, 2014; Canagarajah, 2017; García & Lin, forthcoming) and grassroots worlding practices (Goh, 2014) striving to find their ways of social mobility and negotiating their positioning in the globalized world.
References
Canagarajah, S. A. (2017). The smartest person in the room is the room: Emplacement as language competence. Keynote speech delivered in the Annual Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), 18-21 March 2017, Portland, U.S.A.
García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave.
García, O., & Lin, A. M. Y. (forthcoming). English and multilingualism: A contested history. To appear in P. Seargeant (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies. London, UK: Routledge.
Goh, D. P. S. (2014). (Ed.). Worlding multiculturalisms: The politics of inter-Asian dwelling. London, UK: Routledge.
