Translinguistic Approaches to the Mediation of Transborder Migration
My longstanding research concerns children and youth’s emerging linguistic repertoires and translinguistic discourse practices within the context of transnational migration.
One strand of this research, conducted in collaboration with Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, concerns the pivotal roles that child language brokers perform in quotidian acts of translation and interpreter mediated interactions on behalf of their families and communities.
Currently I am undertaking two ethnographic studies that utilize interdisciplinary methods and frameworks.
The first is a book project in which I employ several traditions within linguistic anthropology to explore the sociolinguistic and semiotic mediation of transborder migration within a Midwestern meat-packing town that gained national attention for a spectacularly staged Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid which resulted in cascading social, political-economic, and personal catastrophes. The study combines ethnography and critical discourse analysis to provide accounts of the cultural politics of immigration being waged in the American heartlands featuring analyses of how clashing narratives are constructed and circulated in ethnographic and oral history interviews, news media reports and essays accounting for the details of the raid and its aftermath immediately after the raid up until its 10 year anniversary, as well as documentary films and other theatrical performances shot and staged in the wake of the raid.
The second is a multi-sited cross- and intra-cultural study of the language ideologies underpinning early childhood language pedagogy and policies within school districts enveloped within the same transborder circuit of migration. In this on-going study, I transformed visual ethnographic film techniques for generating data to make them useful to linguistic anthropological inquiry which can in turn facilitate intercultural dialogue between parents, teachers, administrators, and early childhood educators and specialists of multilingual and multicultural education positioned in school districts that serve the same population of students from different sending and receiving communities.
Ling Anth @ USC 