ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the key analytic concepts employed across diverse academic disciplines concerned with transnationalism and illuminates these concepts' as-yet-unrealized potential for the field of literacy. It explores two areas in literacy research that can be more thoroughly examined through theoretical perspectives that include the analytic concepts associated with transnationalism: literacy education in K-12 schools and transnational educational policy making and practices. The chapter focuses on formal schooling directly implicates the role of nation-states and the educational institutions and agents in the experiences and outcomes of school-age transnational people, as vividly illustrated in Monica's vignette above, and as theorized in other scholarship and research on transnationalism. It suggests a direction for literacy research that merges the personal and social lives of transnational individuals and communities and the institutions and activities of the nation-state. Transnationalism has a relatively short, though potent, presence in literacy research.
