Post on 15-Jan-2015
description
transcript
David Gramling and Chantelle Warner
University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Guiding Questions
� What can an ecological perspective on language and translating tell us about the body politic of an arid, rural, border area between de jure ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries?
� What emergent multilingual landscapes can be documented in such a region, from a language-ecological framework and the subjectivities of the individuals who live and speak within them?
� What does the meaning-making, speaking body have to do with state / law in this particular border context?
Southern Arizona: Snapshot
� Almost 20% of Arizonans speak Spanish; approx. 40% Hispanic or Latino
� 22 Native American tribes in AZ; 25% of the state is tribal land; 4.5% of population identifies as Native American
� Fifth in US per capita for refugee placements; 2007-2011, 10% of newcomers to Pima County were refugees
Tucson Weekly
May 15, 2014
Today, language users have to navigate much less predictable exchanges in which theinterlocutors use a variety of different languages and dialects for various identification purposes, and exercise symbolic power in various ways to get heard and respected. They are asked to mediate inordinately more complex encounters among interlocutors with multiple language capacities and cultural imaginations, and different social and political memories.
(Kramsch 2014: 390)
Linguistic Ecologies
Layering of Phenomena
“And the connection between such scales is
indexical: it resides in the ways in which unique
instances of communication can be captured
(indexically) as ‘‘framed’’ understandable
communication, pointing towards social and
cultural norms, genres, traditions,
expectations— phenomena of a higher scale
level.”
(Blommaert 2007: 4)
Local Case Studies
Foreign, third languages and multilingual subjectivity
Tucson refugees and multiliteracies
Trauma, Translation, and Transgender (January 2015)
International Partnerships (Center for Middle Eastern
Studies)
Curriculum Development (New Doctoral Program and
Seminars in ‘Translation and
Multilingual Studies’
Research Methods
� semi-structured interviews
� participant observations
� ethnography
� focus groups
� curriculum development documents and
journals
Literature Review: Topics
� Language Ecology and Complexity
� Subjectivity and Agency
� Multiliteracies and Education
� Translation in the age of Globalization,
Internationalization, Localization, and
Translation
� Posthumanism vs. Monolingualism
� Deixis and Nationality
Open access journal : cms.arizona.edu
Focus and ScopeThe Journal of Critical Multilingualism Studies is a peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal of scholarship on multilingualism, monolingualism, and their related social, cultural, historical, and literary/medial phenomena. CMS invites scholarly contributions from various fields that take stock of collective paradigmatic and discursive developments vis-à-vis multilingualism in recent years. CMS seeks to offer diverse fields an opportunity to dialogue with one another across and among various disciplinary conventions and vocabularies, while bearing in mind a diverse scholarly audience.