- Topic and Treatment
Despite decades of sociolinguistic and anthropological scholarship affirming the legitimacy of multilingual practices, deficit framings of multilingualism continue to shape educational institutions and public discourse, disproportionately burdening racialized and minoritized language users. Building on foundational work in codeswitching and language contact (Poplack, 1980; Levine, 2011, 2014; Licata, 2023) as well as raciolinguistic perspectives (Rosa & Flores, 2017), this session moves beyond legitimization toward emancipation. Rather than asking whether multilingual practices are valid, we ask what multilingual languagers do with languages, how they resist marginalization, revitalize invisibilized histories and knowledge, and actively reconfigure power. The organizing question animating the session is: What might it mean to future multilingually?
This session also takes up the invitation of the 2027 MLA presidential theme, Emancipatory Narratives. President Herman Beavers reminds us that emancipatory narratives are distinguished by their commitment to both the descriptive and the agential, not merely documenting oppression but inhabiting liberatory space and asserting agency. The presentations seek to do precisely that: they describe how multilingual languagers live their languages and how those lived practices become sites of agency, resistance, identity work, and social transformation.
- Rationale
The urgency of this session lies in a persistent gap between scholarly affirmation of multilingualism and its lived reality for speakers navigating monolingual norms, exclusionary ideologies, and racialized institutional contexts. This session repositions languages not as objects of study but as dynamic, emancipatory practices through which speakers shape their identities, communities, and social worlds, moving the conversation from just describing multilingualism to imagining and enacting the transformative possibilities.
- Relation to Existing Scholarship
This session builds on foundational work in translanguaging (García & Li, 2014), raciolinguistics (Rosa & Flores, 2017), and the multilingual turn in second language studies (May, 2013), while extending these conversations in a novel direction, centering not only what multilingualism is, but what multilingual languagers actually do with languages as agentive, emancipatory actors. By foregrounding visual, affective, and lived dimensions of multilingual identity across classroom, study abroad, and transnational contexts, this session advances the field toward what we call "futuring multilingually."
- Session Format and Time
Our session will consist of three presentations (15 minutes each), along with a brief introduction from the session organizers and presiders at the start. We will conclude with 15 minutes of Questions and Answers from the audience as required by the MLA.
- Individual Presentations
Julia Ruck (Emory University), Embodying Multilingualism: Visual and Metaphorical Constructions of L2 Learners' Linguistic Identities, examines how short-term L2 German study abroad students visually and metaphorically represent their multilingual identities through language portraits, body silhouette outlines filled with colors, shapes, and labels associated with their languages. Foregrounding the affective and embodied dimensions of multilingual identity construction, this presentation reveals aspects of learner experience that remain underexamined in exclusively verbal or textual accounts.
Lei (Stella) Xia (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Translingual Becoming Through Everyday Experience of Language(s), draws on a case study from a broader multiple-case study of Mandarin Language Assistants in Aotearoa New Zealand to examine how one participant navigates her sense of self and linguistic legitimacy through everyday language experience. Using interactional sociolinguistics and a translanguaging lens, Xia shows how translanguaging practice becomes a site of individual struggle and contestation oriented toward translingual becoming, grounding the session's emancipatory vision in lived, transnational realities.
Daniela Salcedo Arnaiz (California State University, Northridge), Living Spanish in the United States: Language Ideologies, Agency, and the Reworking of Power in the Classroom, examines how university students, predominantly native and heritage speakers of Spanish, live, negotiate, and reimagine Spanish as an emancipatory resource in Los Angeles. Drawing on participant observation, fieldnotes, and interviews, Salcedo Arnaiz proposes pathways for mobilizing languages to resist marginalization and reconfigure relations of power in a politically urgent, community-embedded United States context.
- Diversity of Voices
This session brings together a diverse constellation of scholars spanning ranks, from a doctoral candidate to assistant teaching professor, and tenured associate professor, as well as a range of institutional types, including a public research university, a private research university, a liberal arts university, a regional state university, and an international research university. Geographic diversity spans the United States and New Zealand. The panel engages with multilingual communities across German, Spanish, and Mandarin contexts and across the United States, New Zealand, and in Europe. Gender diversity is reflected across all five participants, ensuring that futuring multilingually is examined from across the full range of contexts in which multilingual languagers live, work, and resist, and become empowered.