Traveling texts, translocal/transnational literacies, and transcontextual analysis

Jan Blommaert made two key moves toward the sociolinguistics of mobility, providing specific frameworks and tools for the study of traveling texts, translocal/transnational literacies, and transcontextual analysis. The relationship between classroom-based and out-of-school literacy practices is a central theme running through such studies, with a general trend in the analyses demonstrating that out-of-school literacy practices are often enabling of students’ transnational identities. Abdelmalek Sayad’s principles would suggest much more multisited and diachronic or longitudinal forms of ethnography of migration, and of networks across all kinds of translocal and transnational spaces. Given the deep and growing inequality in the real world and in the world of scholarly research, J. Friedman’s and Sayad’s work argues for a direct embracing of the political dimensions of the study of migration as refracted through the different principles he outlines. Decontextualization from one social context involves recontextualization in another, and this is a transformational process.