ABSTRACT
We live in an interconnected world, awash in flows, with capital, people, information, texts, languages, and media moving, shifting, and blending across geographic, cultural, and political borders (Appadurai, 1996; cf. Beck, 2000; Maira & Soep, 2005). Appadurai, who earlier most powerfully articulated the nation-spanning, border-crossing potential of current patterns of globalization, has recently emended this metaphor of flows, acknowledging not just smooth circulations, but “global bumps, borders, black holes, and quarks, the diacritics of the new global order” (2013, p.1). We write this chapter knowing that the migration of people and the movement of texts are everywhere, bringing changes, and perceptions of changes, to demographic and semiotic landscapes (Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Vertovec, 2007). Our interest is to explore the implications of these changes for conceptions and practices of literacy, including academic versions (cf. Canagarajah, 2002; Luke, 2003; Stornaiuolo, Hull, & Nelson, 2009). Global flows are uneven and unequal, and their impacts on the lives of most are uncertain, making paramount the role of creative, critical, and ethically alert educations for the widest spectrum of citizenry. As North American educators and researchers, we hope to contribute to understandings of the transnational language and literacy practices of youth within the U.S. and elsewhere, in such a way as to make conceptions of literacy both responsive to and transformative of our changing world (Hull, Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009).
