Abstract Summary
Based on findings from a case study derived from a larger ethnographic project that attends to the learning and living experiences of 8 undergraduate Chinese international students in the U.S., we foreground in this paper the affordances of a transliteracy-based understanding to examine student sojourners’ educational paths and life trajectories.
Abstract :
The paper presented in this symposium is part of a larger and ongoing ethnographic project that attends to the learning and living experiences of 8 undergraduate Chinese international students in the U.S. In the paper, we adopt a case study approach (Yin, 2003) to advance an argument concerning the implications of developing a transliteracy-based understanding for examining how one of the focal students negotiates his identities, agency, and belonging in a transnational milieu. In reference to Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips’s (2017) theorization of transliteracy, we define this notion in terms of its focus on the potential of literacy practices to index “critical and creative social semiotic practices arising within complex ideological networks and characterized by the movement of people and things” (p. 72). The student featured in our case was a rising junior enrolled in a large U.S. public university. Over a period of 12 months, we followed and documented the literacy practices associated with the everyday experiences of the student, which cut across a range of digitally- and analogically-mediated activities identified in both academic and non-academic domains. Drawing on qualitative content and thematic analyses of the ethnographic data collected through our fieldwork, we argue that the student’s literacy practices, as interpreted through the transliteracy lens, call into question the home-host dichotomies as a dominant paradigm to characterize student sojourners involved in the global landscape of higher education. As demonstrated in our case, the student transcended the binary paradigm through his agentive, literacy-mediated construction of transnational identities and belonging vis-à-vis a multi-threaded web of people, time, space, discourses, and contexts (re)connected by material and symbolic ties in contingent ways. By foregrounding the affordances of the transliteracy-based understanding in our case, we call for a paradigm shift to envisage a more empowering conceptualization of the student sojourners’ learning and living experiences.
