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Research

I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose work lives at the intersections of multilingual writing (Rhetoric and Writing), teacher identity research (Second Language Studies), and transnational literacy studies (Education). My identity as a transnational multilingual woman as well as my interests in the language and identity negotiation in the contexts of writing and literacy education shape my research agenda. I situate my theorization of language diversity in the context of the increasingly diverse, multilingual, and international student body on college campuses, asking what it is that multilingual students can offer to and gain from college writing classrooms. Thus, through research, I attend to the ways in which multiple languages and cultures are communicated and negotiated? to move away from harmful monolingual ideologies and toward asset-based approach to language difference.

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Image: Presenting at 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Chicago

Core Research Inquiries

I seek beyond text analysis and look at holistic language and identity practices of multilingual writers. 

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  1. How do multilingual writers navigate social structures ridden with monolingual and raciolinguistic ideologies that index them from a deficit point of view?

  2. How do they negotiate these spaces? What strategies do they use? What challenges do they encounter? 

I seek to examine larger structural contexts in which multilingual writers language.

 

  1. How can US institutions of higher education transform into more inclusive spaces so that multilingual students and teachers can leverage their rich cultural and linguistic background as learning and teaching resources?

  2. How can we honor their complex identities instead of tokenizing them as ‘multilingual’ or erasing them? 

1 |      Dissertation

My dissertation, Hybrid Identity as Pedagogy: Auto/Ethnographic Approach to Transnational Translingual Asian Writing Teacher Identities, began from two big gaps: (1) Teachers with multilingual and multicultural backgrounds remain absent from the literature that tends to focus on students’ language diversity, leaving how their linguistic and cultural backgrounds impact writing pedagogy unexplored, and (2) not only absent in the literature, multilingual teachers are invisible in the departments and everyday professional contexts while their teacher identities are looked through deficit lenses or tokenized as ‘multilingual’ who are only able to teach multilingual writing. Given these gaps, to capture and visibilize multilingual teachers’ lived experiences, I conducted a self study to review my experiences as a Korean migrant multilingual writing teacher as well

Image: My hybrid transnational life across time and spaces represented by Guanyu Xu's work, "Resident Alien," Eli Broad Museum, Michigan State University

as two case studies on other multilingual teachers to triangulate the findings. What our stories showed was that we have various strategies for negotiating and presenting our cultural and linguistic identities to navigate spaces that marked us raciolinguistically marginal and deficient. These negotiations weren’t limited to the classroom, but also in the departments, at the university level, and even beyond, in daily lives, where we engaged in strategies that involve passing, resisting, or transforming to work with various contexts of biases we were facing. At times, for example, we strategically become nonracial and acultural to navigate racialization of Asian as “foreign” and “accented.” Other times, we strategically leverage our cultural knowledge and linguistic repertoire to resist dominant narratives on our identities and rewrite or negotiate who we are in that particular moment and space. With this project, I push for recognition of multilingual teachers’ invisible identity labor as well as their linguistic and cultural backgrounds as pedagogical assets.

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