Scholars within the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) have called for situating the field in wider social, cultural, political, and global contexts. Despite a growing body of scholarship in this area, less attention has been focused on ways these issues are bound up in 21st-century global innovation and start-up ecosystems. This article addresses these issues by examining case studies of three high-tech initiatives in an emerging start-up ecosystem within the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In making this move, the research offers a theoretical and methodological framework for examining global innovation systems as they are constructed, enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed. Arguing for attention to the links between space and the politics of mobility, the author specifically examines the interplay of literacies, identities, technologies, mobilities, geographies, and practices.

Tracing the literacy practices of an Israeli soldier, this case study examines how his engagement in multilingual and multimodal (MML) composing affects his ways of thinking about and doing literacy. It specifically attends to how MML practices dispose writers to certain orientations to reading, writing, speaking, and design.

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants’ trajectories across this social field, the author argues for a conceptualization of entrepreneurs as knotworkers who mobilize genres, modes, languages, and spaces.

The notion of translingual practice has gained much currency within college composition and sociolinguistics over the last few years. Translingual practices challenge structuralist conceptualizations of language as discrete, bounded, impermeable, autonomous systems, conceptualizations that unfortunately (1) privilege linguistic codes over nonlinguistic ones, and (2) contribute to the hierarchization and separation of languages, leading some languages and their corresponding users to be valued more than others. To counter such a stance, we advocate the use of translingual pedagogy, which values the fluid communicative practices of learners who mobilize multiple semiotic resources to facilitate communication. By sharing examples from our own classrooms,we also underscore the need for teachers to recognize and expand the communicative repertoires of their students. This pedagogical shift, as we illustrate, is accompanied by an instructional commitment to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness and cultural sensitivities in order to create inclusive and equitable learning environments.

Drawing on a case study of an Israeli start-up company, this article maps out a theoretical and methodological framework for linking local multilingual and multimodal literacy practices to wider institutional, cultural, and global contexts. Central to this framework is attention to the linking of tools, texts, and people distributed across space-time. This process foregrounds the complex mediation of activity and the dynamic pathways shaping the ways English is being reassembled in local-global ecologies.

This article argues that tracing multimodal-multilingual literacy practices across official and unofficial spaces is key to moving composition into the twenty-first century. Key tothis remixing of the field is a situated framework that locates multimodal-multilingual activities in wider genre, cultural, national, and global ecologies.