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

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

2. 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?

3. 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

4. Tucson Weekly
May 15, 2014

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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’

8. Research Methods
semi-structured interviews
participant observations
ethnography
focus groups
curriculum development documents and
journals

9. 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

10. Open access journal : cms.arizona.edu
Focus and Scope
The 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.