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Emerging Identities in Translingual Spaces: Writers (Re-)Negotiate Race, Caste, Gender, and Nationality This panel will present research on writing in three very different settings. In one, first-year composition students from diverse linguistic backgrounds explore their own literate histories and those of their classmates while conducting primary research into the language practices that surround them. Another project explores remedial English writing education in India, finding learners negotiating tensions between the formalistic Academic English style dominating classroom instruction and their lived multilingual practices. A third project analyzes ways anti-immigration logic informs the unequal circulation of translingual public writing that undergraduate students and Latin American immigrant maintenance workers create together at a U.S. university. All three projects represent ways that emerging pedagogical practices inform and are informed by translingual theories of writing (Canagarajah, 2011; Mao, 2010; Horner, 2011; Matsuda, 2006; and Lu, 2010) and explore how writers work within environments that are vexed by macro- and micro-level political and institutional tensions and by entrenched notions of linguistic and cultural homogeneity in educational settings that are at odds with global realities. They also show possibilities for literate growth and positive social change that can come from writing education models that draw upon the experiences of language users who come into classes already adept at shuttling between dialects and languages in everyday settings. Speakers 1 and 2 will present from their research on a first-year writing curriculum pilot in a large U.S. urban university. Comprised of equal numbers of native English users and language learners from other countries, these classes focus on writing across cultural and linguistic borders. Curricular materials and assignments are designed with consciousness of multilingual global realities and represent writing in diverse media, genres, and Englishes. The research draws on two conceptual frames for analysis: figured worlds and positioning theory. Figured worlds is a model of selfhood and identification that blurs distinctions between individual agents and their social contexts, describing learning and identification as fluid, adaptive, and dialectical (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain, 1998). Positioning theory provides a means of understanding perceptions of social reality and possibilities. Emphasizing storylines, the cultural narratives that people use to understand and act in their surroundings, position theory provides a framework for understanding how agents perceive their rights, responsibilities, and identities, and the social forces that surround them (Anderson, 2009; Harr and Van Langenhove, 1991; Slocum-Bradley, 2009). Surveys and interviews were conducted to understand participants literacy histories. Additionally, samples of student writing were collected, coded, and analyzed. Using this data, the researchers developed case studies that describe how students position themselves in classes where there is no singular linguistic target of approximation. Early analysis of the data shows that some students who are native English users feel a heightened sense of

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linguistic and cultural dissonance in these classes that unsettle deeply "figured" notions of cultural and linguistic stability. They respond to this dissonance in various ways, including through explicit proclamations of their identities as native English users in their writing, and through using dialogue and writing to reconfigure their conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Students also show evidence of a heightened awareness of writing as transcultural negotiation, as they contrast their experiences in literacy education, and explore tensions within institutional definitions of language users. This presentation will provide an overview of the pilot, and share case studies that show students positioning themselves in terms of literacy education, language, and identity. Speaker 3 will discuss the teaching and learning of English writing in an especially marked site of remedial English coaching scheme in Indias universities and technology institutes in relation to research in academic literacies, World Englishes, and remedial writing. The study utilized surveys, participant-observations, interviews, and textual analyses to examine a) students and teachers understanding of academic writing in English, b) their ideas about, and practice of, producing good writing, and c) the various factors that impact the production of academic writing. Using the themes that emerged from the data (such as what counted as voice, identity, and English or vernacular style of writing), the study demonstrates not only the persistence of various features identified as both Anglo-American and Indian but also an attempt at organizing writing by privileging the apparently English style over the local one. While students tried to follow their teachers and textbooks exhortations to be direct, logical, persuasive, and precise, they also drew on local cultural and linguistic repertoires to negotiate their audience and purpose, especially since they knew that their immediate audiences were local and multilingual. The study complicates purely cultural models of writing research and advances a trans-cultural analytical framework in the study of writing across cultures. Horner, Lu, Jones-Royster, and Trimbur (2011) posited that translingual education requires the disposition of openness and inquiry that people take toward language and language differences. What happens to this disposition when translingual writing blurs geographical borders across the Americas and institutional borders between workers and students? Speaker 4 will present research findings from the last three years of a translingual writing course at Emerson College in Boston. This course brings together students and maintenance workers (janitors) to collaborate on writing that explores their identities as writers in the context of U.S. immigration policy. The course includes undergraduate students (U.S. Latinos, Latin American citizens, and non-Latinos) and immigrant maintenance workers from Latin America who were forced to flee war in their home countries. Participants write in Spanish, English, and five other languages. This case study analyzes the circulation of more than 500 pages of student and worker writing across six classes over the last three years and reveals two radically different ways that writing by the workers and students circulate. Students, teachers, workers and city community members continue to create

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alternative networks that build campus conditions to support what we have come to call cross-border translingual writing. But even though Emerson College community members of all institutional status celebrate the circulation of undergraduate student writing, they simultaneously block the circulation of the workers writing, even when these texts have been co-authored.