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Mission Statement of Translingual Literacy Studies at UNM Digital Hub

The Translingual Literacy Studies at UNM Digital Hub presents an interweaving tapestry of texts to illustrate the transformational possibilities of:

Translingual

Transcultural

Transracial

Transgender

Transnational

Transrhetorical

Transgenre

Transdisciplinary

Language and Literacy Practices.

The mission of the Translingual Literacy Studies at UNM Digital Hub is to provide an open- source cross-institutional platform by curating and circulating resources within and beyond the UNM educational community for the purpose of research, scholarship, teaching, cultural performance, artistic expression, and community engagement.  The Translingual Literacy Studies Digital Hub seeks to foreground the multiplicity of texts and ethnolinguistic strands that constitute civic pluralism.   

Translingual Literacy Studies engages the cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic resources across diverse discourse communities (codes, varieties, and dialects) in written and oral texts. The Translingual Literacy Studies Digital Hub offers a dynamic digital space to share resources among scholars, teachers, artists, activists, community leaders, and citizens.

The Translingual Literacy Studies at UNM Digital Hub offers a descriptive and inductive approach to celebrating language diversity in order to explore the rich variations of transformational identity and social practice, eschewing more prescriptive and reductive modalities. 

This project seeks to make linguistic racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism visible, confront language myths and disabling fictions; stimulate rhetorical pluralism; affirm racial and ethnolinguistic-diversity; model generative discourses and efficacious literacy practices; connect historical civil rights narratives of justice to current problems and conversations; promote deliberative democratic practice in the public sphere. 

Exigences:

Linguistic racism remains one of the most insidious and unaddressed obstacles to higher education for historically underrepresented students. While it is a basic tenet of linguistics that all languages are equal, it is an enduring social reality that not all languages have equal social value. This fact directly impacts student retention, graduation rates, and graduate school placement for first generation and historically marginalized groups—and in turn, reproduces social inequality and limits democratic participation.

The growing incidence of racist public rhetoric represents an exigence for teachers to confront myths of linguistic homogeneity, challenge misconceptions about language purity, and problematize the notion of English as the monoglot standard.

The Translingual Literacy Studies at UNM Digital Hub seeks to foreground the wholeness of our community’s ethnolinguistic resources as reflected in diverse transformational identities and generative social practice through language and literacy. Trans-identity discourses across academic, professional, and civic spheres represent possibilities for resilience and resistance culturally, environmentally, intellectually, rhetorically, textually, and linguistically. 

This cross-institutional project responds to structural discrimination in higher education by addressing linguistic racism impacting literacy education across the curriculum by applying principles and practices that advance literacy education and linguistic equality as a civil right and civic responsibility.  

The Translingual Literacy Studies Digital Hub has been designed to serve students, teachers, civic leaders, community members, administrators, and researchers toward enhancing democratic practice, civic engagement, and ethnolinguistically-diverse literacy education.