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David Gramling and Chantelle Warner University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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Presentation by David Gramling and Chantelle Warner (Case Study 4)

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Page 1: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

David Gramling and Chantelle Warner

University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

Page 2: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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?

Page 3: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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

Page 4: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

Tucson Weekly

May 15, 2014

Page 5: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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

Page 6: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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)

Page 7: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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’

Page 8: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

Research Methods

� semi-structured interviews

� participant observations

� ethnography

� focus groups

� curriculum development documents and

journals

Page 9: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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

Page 10: Multilingual Ecologies in the American Southwest Borderland

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.