Crossing BW/ESL/FYW Divides: Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs Toward a Vocabulary of Motives and Dispositions: Addressing the Literacy Needs of Novice Writers in a Translingual/Transcultural World Juan C. Guerra English Department University of Washington

My Goals in This Talk Discuss the concept of figurations as feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti uses it in the context of her book Nomadic Subjects (1994). Provide a frame of reference for discussing the motives and dispositions that novice writers must have at their disposal in “an increasingly challenging and difficult world” (Selfe, 2009). Describe the transfigural terrains that writing students must learn to navigate and negotiate in their everyday lives both in school and out. Review the 3 dominant ideologies of literacy that guide how we address language difference in the classroom and beyond.

A Vocabulary of Figurations (Rather than Metaphors) Figurations are politically informed accounts of an alternative subjectivity designed to help us “learn to think differently about the subject, invent new frameworks, new images, new modes of thought.” Because this figurative mode functions according to what Braidotti calls “the philosophy of ‘as if’”—“as if some experiences were reminiscent or evocative of others”—a figuration has the potential to open up, “through successive repetitions and mimetic strategies, spaces where alternative forms of agency can be engendered.”

Rosi Braidotti’s Nomad The nomad is [Braidotti’s] own figuration of a situated, postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject in general and of the feminist subject in particular. This subject can also be described as postmodern/industrial/colonial, depending on one’s locations. The figure of the nomad, as opposed to the exile, allows us to think of international dispersion and dissemination of ideas not only on the banal and hegemonic model of the tourist or traveler but also as forms of resistance, as ways of preserving ideas that may otherwise have been condemned to willful obliteration or to collectively produced amnesia.

Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Consciousness A nomadic consciousness... combines features that are usually perceived as opposing, namely the possession of a sense of identity that rests not on fixity but on contingency. The nomadic consciousness combines coherence with mobility. It aims to rethink the unity of the subject, without reference to humanistic beliefs, without dualistic oppositions, linking instead body and mind in a new set of intensive and often intransitive transitions. Nomadic consciousness is akin to what Foucault called counter- memory; it is a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self.

The Critical Practice of Transcultural Repositioning The Critical Practice of Transcultural Repositioning A “full quiver of semiotic modes” (Selfe, 2009) and practices informed by a dynamic and productive set of motives and dispositions that novice writers can use to navigate, mediate and negotiate the challenging and difficult social, cultural and linguistic moments they encounter in their everyday lives. If they are regulated nimbly, self-reflexively rather than only intuitively, and tactically, these modes and practices allow students to move back and forth more effectively between and across different languages and dialects, different social classes, different cultural and artistic forms, different ways of seeing and thinking about the increasingly fluid and hybridized world emerging all around us.

A Vocabulary of Motives Men [and women] discern situations with particular vocabularies, and it is in terms of some delimited vocabulary that they anticipate consequences of conduct.... In a societal situation, implicit in the names for consequences is the social dimension of motives. Through such vocabularies, types of societal controls operate. “Both motives and actions very often originate not from within but from the situation in which individuals find themselves...." [This sociological conception of motives] translates the question of "why" into a "how" that is answerable in terms of a situation and its typ[ic]al vocabulary of motives, i.e., those which conventionally accompany that type [of] situation and function as cues and justifications for normative actions in it. C. Wright Mills (1940) C. Wright Mills (1940)

A Vocabulary of Dispositions The habitus is a subjective but not individual [system of dispositions], schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class and constituting the precondition for all objectification and apperception. One of the fundamental effects of the orchestration of [a system of dispositions] is the production of a commonsense world endowed with the objectivity secured by consensus in the meaning and practices of the world. Pierre Bourdieu (1977) Pierre Bourdieu (1977)

Alternative Transfigural Representations of the Dominant Ideologies of Literacy Life in the Either/Or (A Traditional Conception of Literacy) Life in the Both/And (A Tolerant Conception of Literacy) Life in the Neither/Nor (A Translingual Conception of Literacy)

Three Approaches to Language Difference MONOLINGUAL MULTILINGUAL TRANSLINGUAL MONOLINGUAL MULTILINGUAL TRANSLINGUAL MONOCULTURAL MULTICULTURAL POLYCULTURAL MONOCULTURAL MULTICULTURAL POLYCULTURAL Assimilation Acculturation Transculturation Assimilation Acculturation Transculturation Code Segregation Code Switching Code Meshing Code Segregation Code Switching Code Meshing Eradication Accommodation Hybridization Eradication Accommodation Hybridization Colonization Neocolonization Decolonization Colonization Neocolonization Decolonization Agrarian Industrial Technological Agrarian Industrial Technological Traditional Modern Postmodern Traditional Modern Postmodern

A Monolingual/Monocultural Approach to Language Difference Assimilation Code Segregation EradicationColonizationAgrarianTraditional

A Multilingual/Multicultural Approach to Language Difference Acculturation Code Switching AccommodationNeocolonizationIndustrialModern

A Translingual/Polycultural Approach to Language Difference Transculturation Code Meshing HybridizationDecolonizationTechnologicalPostmodern

Three Approaches to Language Difference MONOLINGUAL MULTILINGUAL TRANSLINGUAL MONOLINGUAL MULTILINGUAL TRANSLINGUAL MONOCULTURAL MULTICULTURAL POLYCULTURAL MONOCULTURAL MULTICULTURAL POLYCULTURAL Assimilation Acculturation Transculturation Assimilation Acculturation Transculturation Code Segregation Code Switching Code Meshing Code Segregation Code Switching Code Meshing Eradication Accommodation Hybridization Eradication Accommodation Hybridization Colonization Neocolonization Decolonization Colonization Neocolonization Decolonization Agrarian Industrial Technological Agrarian Industrial Technological Traditional Modern Postmodern Traditional Modern Postmodern

Crossing BW/ESL/FYW Divides: Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs Toward a Vocabulary of Motives and Dispositions: Addressing the Literacy Needs of Novice Writers in a Translingual/Transcultural World Juan C. Guerra English Department University of Washington