Cultivating “Translationships” through Multilingual Community-Engaged Digital Storytelling Pedagogies

Abstract

This dissertation study examines translational relationships / “translationships” between people and across cultures, languages, and world views and how these are built, made sense of, and sustained in, through, and across collaborative, multilingual/translingual, multimodal storytelling spaces in adult language learning. The Multilingual Storytelling Translationships project is an ongoing partnership between myself and English faculty member Cristina Sánchez-Martín with local community based organizations and adult English language learners which includes storytelling workshops and classes, a website repository for multilingual stories, and a podcast where storytellers engage in conversations contextualizing their knowledge and reflect on the experiences of telling and translating stories in community. The qualitative approach I take in this dissertation looks to critical and participatory ethnography, humanizing research and the storytelling methodologies of Indigenous research, how they overlap and intersect in ways that highlight the potential of research to open up spaces of collaborative knowledge making and prioritize relationships in the process. I also engage podcasting as a core method and means of analysis in conversation with my own individual analysis of the ethnographic data. I incorporate the origami crane as a personally meaningful heuristic metaphor throughout the dissertation that helps me to both envision and explain the underlying theories and methodologies that guided both the research design, the analysis and the findings. The reflections in this dissertation show how we found options for multilingual and transnational identity construction and opportunities to engage in “loving perception and ‘world’-travel” (Lugones, 1987) through storytelling and dialogue. A combination of collective and individual storying layered with contextualization, translation, writing, conversation, interpretation, interviews, and digital modalities allowed us to shape our practices towards transnational identity-in-story, using stories and storytelling for different modes of identity construction, and transnational identity-in-relation, contextual, mutually constitutive processes of co-constructing new expressions of identity based on relationships. This work demonstrates how, by imagining and enacting forms of practice that are not in themselves epistemically violent, i.e. storytelling, translanguaging, and relationality, we were able to interrupt, to some extent, linguistically mediated cycles of coloniality within the context of the project.