Translanguaging space, decoloniality, and epistemic justice in educational spaces

Building on ‘translanguaging space’ (Li Wei 2011. Moment analysis and translanguaging space: discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1222–1235) and ‘decoloniality’ (Mignolo, W. D. 2007. Introduction: coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking. Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3: 155–167; Quijano, A. 2007. Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies 21, no. 2-3: 168–178), we discuss how focusing on epistemic positionality and identity affirmation among multilingual students offers critical perspectives on understanding the role of translanguaging as a social justice pedagogy. Adopting a critical ethnographic approach, we analyze the data from a Multilingual Creative Writing Project for South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong and Translanguaging Pedagogy in Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) in Mainland China. The analysis shows that translanguaging as a social justice pedagogy is an action that challenges linguistic and epistemic boundaries to affirm and reclaim multilingual students’ ‘translingual being’ (Li Wei, 2024. Transformative pedagogy for inclusion and social justice through translanguaging, co-learning, and transpositioning. Language Teaching, 57, no. 2: 203–214). Our findings suggest that translanguaging pedagogy should focus on affirming the epistemic subjecthood of multilingual students. For this, translanguaging could be purposefully integrated into pedagogical activities to show how breaking linguistic and epistemic boundaries is essential to reclaiming multilingual students’ translingual being and positioning them as epistemic subjects.