Developed from a collaborative transdisciplinary analysis of transfer scholarship, we redefine transfer as a relational phenomenon to capture the “dynamic, emergent, embodied, messy” elements of writing transfer (Prior and Olinger 137). Relationality also highlights conceptual relationships in transfer research that produce seeming contradictions but are more often complementary than confounding.

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As recent transnational literacy scholarship has shown, acculturation theories homogenize migrant experiences with literacy, often placing young writers on a developmental continuum that implies distancing from homeland practices and communities. Absent more complex theories, the relation between homeland practices, transnational experiences, and local literacies remains difficult to determine. This conundrum prompts this study’s guiding question: How does the transnational inhere in and motivate local literacies? Drawing from lifespan interviews and collected texts of one adult transnational writer (“Clara”), I examine how situated practice coordinates the “here” and “there” within transnational social fields. I find that orientations to and purposes for literacy inherited and made in Clara’s childhood, particularly her and her family’s experience of transnational migration, persisted as sets of patterned social actions that she self-assigned to diverse types of local writing; findings show her building up genre from an emic perspective over time. While Clara’s genre infrastructure persisted at the level of social action, linguistic achievement of those genres was more precarious. I call this set of self-generated, patterned social actions Clara’s genre repertoire from below, and argue that it guided and governed her movement across texts encountered and produced in home, school, and work contexts to ultimately become a bridge across difference in her work as a bilingual educator. This grounded study contributes the construct of genre repertoires from below and its method of genre mapping to make visible how extracurricular and in-school literacy grow together in response to and in support of transnational writers’ everyday experiences.

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy, the author investigates the distinct effects that shuttling between national contexts have on the accumulation and use of genre knowledge. Specifically, through a case study of one Third Culture Kid student writer, the author reports on how her genre knowledge develops in response to transnational relocations between Italy and the United States and the way this transnational genre knowledge informs her writing of a high-stakes in-school genre. This case illustrates the value of rhetorical genre studies for understanding the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy and begins to outline the distinctiveness of transnational boundary-crossing practices.