Writing Toward a Decolonial Option: A Bilingual Student’s Multimodal Composing as a Site of Translingual Activism and Justice

Written Communication Jan 2023

Writing Toward a Decolonial Option: A Bilingual Student’s Multimodal Composing as a Site of Translingual Activism and Justice

Eunjeong Lee University of Houston

Abstract

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.

Journal: Written Communication
Published: 2023-01-01
DOI: 10.1177/07410883221134640
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality race and writing translingualism

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (3)

Dryer et al. (2025)

Editors’ Note

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Autry et al. (2024)

Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English

Research in the Teaching of English
Lee (2024)

Knowing, Feeling, and Doing Language with Communities: Racialized Multilingual …

College English

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Written Communication
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Research in the Teaching of English
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Written Communication

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