Emotion, Silence and Meaning Making in Translanguaging Towards Social Justice in Strangers

Abstract

This article is part of a project on social justice and its objective here is twofold: to present the partial results of an ongoing research, which started in September, in 2019, to show evidence that translanguaging is only mentioned once by one of the research participants, which reinforces the need to approach it in educational environment and to illustrate the place of emotion, silence and meaning making towards social justice, through the analysis of a short film, seeking to expand studies on translanguaging. This is also justified by the fact that, undergraduate students majoring in Portuguese and English languages, understand translanguaging as the uses of diverse languages, but do not recognize trans-semiosis, emotion and silence as entangled in meaning making. It borrows views from García; Alves ( 2019), García; Wei ( 2014), García ( 2020), Blackledge; Creese ( 2011), Canagarajah ( 2013), Makalela ( 2015, 2016, 2017), Makalela; Dhokotera ( 2021), Nkadimeng; Makalela ( 2015) in dialogue with decolonial perspectives by Grosfoguel ( 2013), Menezes de Souza ( 2021), Mignolo; Walsh ( 2018), Maldonado-Torres ( 2007), Quijano ( 2007) and Southern theories by Santos ( 2018). Views on emotion are supported by Barcelos (2005) and Aragão ( 2011). Concerning silence, it draws on localized and meaningful aspects, as argued by Granger ( 2004) and King ( 2013). The methodology is qualitative and interpretive, assuming my intersubjectivity ingrained in the aforementioned theories, which also inform my locus of enunciation to analyze the film in question. The participants are all volunteers chosen according to the sequence of their affirmative responses to want to become informants of this research. This group is formed of five professors, (under)graduate students of languages from public Brazilian universities. Working on and/or studying at public universities was crucial for the criterion concerning the invitations. The instruments to generate data include online individual interviews and questionnaires. One question of each of these modalities is sent to the participants via WhatsApp and/or email per term. This is the penultimate one. The partial results reveal that translanguaging might gain potentials for experimentation, setting emotion and silence into movements with religious, identitary, cultural and political issues, away from stability. Such movements embrace their own danger, relief and ambiguity, playing a crucial role in translanguaging for social justice.