Translanguaging with(out) trans people: AAAL 2026 colloquium

Emerging from our first topical focus of 2024-2025, our colloquium Translanguaging with(out) trans people: Exploring translanguaging through trans studies has been accepted for AAAL 2026 in Chicago! 

Date: Tuesday, March 24
Time: 10:10am-12:10pm
Location: Goldcoast Room - Hotel Lobby Level - 3rd Floor

About the colloquium:

This colloquium engages translanguaging and trans studies to explore how these paradigms may critically inform each other. Translanguaging has emerged as a radical intervention in applied linguistics, raising critical onto-epistemological questions regarding what language is (Makoni & Pennycook, 2012; Wei, 2018), how it works (Canagarajah, 2012), and how it is learned and taught (García et al., 2017). Likewise, trans studies asks us to question the power-laden contestation of border crossings and to focus on materiality and embodied, contextualized ways of knowing (e.g., Radi, 2019). Nevertheless, although translanguaging operates with the ‘trans’ prefix and shares critical theoretical commitments with trans studies, such as questioning the role of normativities and exploring boundary crossings, there remains room for transness and gender (non)normativities to be more thoroughly integrated into translanguaging research and applied linguistics more broadly. Emerging from synergistic discussions in our interdisciplinary collaborative group, this colloquium asks what productive tensions arise between translanguaging and trans studies, and what this may tell us about the roles of subjectivity, relationality, embodiment, and more in languaging practices. 

In reimagining the role of “trans” in translanguaging, this colloquium pushes applied linguists to rethink and expand our disciplinary practices into seemingly disparate interdisciplines. Included talks range from an overview talk on the theoretical synergies and differences between translanguaging and trans studies; affective desire and crip linguistic approaches to translanguaging; the role of relationality for trans artists in a translingual art show; and embodied resistance in multimodal ASL interpreter education. 

Talks & presenters:

Questioning antinormativity: Thinking with trans studies in translanguaging research
Yi-Fan Li, Hannah Lukow, Julian Canjura, Jung In Lee, Elanur Sönmez (Penn State) 

Transing boundaries, centering relationships
Montreal Benesch (UC Santa Barbara)

Trans-embodied translingualism: Desire, risk, and affective labor of meaning
Merve Özçelik & Suresh Canagarajah (Penn State)

Translanguaging and trans-affirmation in ASL interpreter education
Nicky Macias (UC Santa Barbara)

Discussant
Ariana Steele (Penn State)