Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
Understanding that multimodality is a critical part of language work, this article
examines the conditions for uptaking multimodality. With a focus on the material
conditions and/of the labor crucial in building a culture of multimodality, we discuss how our context of Queens College (QC), a senior college in the public-serving CUNY system, where the majority of the students represents what Hall (2009) has described as the “Next America,” shapes the implementation and the impact of multimodal work for our students and educators. Particularly for multilingual students, whose multimodal meaning-making potential is often disregarded as irrelevant to their “language needs” (Sánchez-Martín et al., 2019), their multimodal composing can teach us about the labor that goes into such work, including how they draw on multimodality and multilingualism dynamically as embodied and material practices. We argue that the work of building and sustaining multimodality along with multilingualism is also a work toward linguistic justice (Baker-Bell, 2020) that should contend with ideologies that racialize and minoritize our students and their language and literacy practices
Comments
This article was originally published as: Lee, Eunjeong, Sara P. Alvarez, and Amy J. Wan. "Cultivating Multimodality from the Multilingual Epicenter: Queens, 'The Next America'." Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies. vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1256-1281.