Research Strand I

Publications and Ongoing Scholarship

Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence

Further advancing the use of the Black immigrant literacies prism as a lens for asset-based approaches to teaching, I have authored the Cambridge University Press book titled, “Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence,” published in 2024.

This book challenges the notion of translanguaging as a construct typically applied to certain ‘named’ languages in schools and highlights theoretical and practical considerations for using translanguaging with Englishes based on the lens of Black immigrant literacies in ways that advance transraciolinguistic justice.

In this book, I argue that there are unique opportunities for teachers to engage with what are often referred to as students’ ‘dialects’ (i.e., including inferiorly positioned Englishes no matter whether they belong to Black children or not) by looking through the lens of Black immigrant literacies. Specifically, the book: (a) identifies holistic literacies demonstrated by Black Caribbean immigrant youth and reflects how the youth use these literacies based on translanguaging; (b) provides numerous examples of specific ways in which the languaging (i.e., Englishes) of Black Caribbean youth are racialized as they engage in translanguaging across the Caribbean and the United States; and (c) presents a heuristic containing elements based on the holistic literacies identified in the lived experiences of Black Caribbean immigrant youth.

These notions began to emerge in part, in the co-authored the book with Drs. Arlette Willis & Gwendolyn McMillon, “Affirming Black Students’ Lives and Literacies: Bearing Witness,” published by Teachers College Press in 2022. I am continuing to advance them further in the co-edited book with Drs. Vaughn Watson & Michelle Knight-Manuel published by Teachers College Press titled “Educating African-Immigrant Youth: Schooling, Education and Civic Engagement in the Global African Diaspora” (2024).

Invited to present the fields of language and literacy with futuristic ways of utilizing insights from Black immigrants to guide how raciolinguistic justice can be achieved in and beyond classrooms, I published the article titled, “Black immigrants in the United States: Transraciolinguistic justice for imagined futures in a global metaverse,” invited by the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics [IF: 4.032].

In conjunction, the articles, “A transraciolinguistic approach for literacy classroom” in The Reading Teacher [IF: 1.281],“Characterizing competing tensions in Black immigrant literacies: Beyond partial representations of success,” [IF: 4.340], and “Centralizing place as past(s), present(s), future(s): Hybridities of literate identities and place in the life of a Black immigrant scholar” have been critical to demonstrating how the lens of the Black immigrant can reflect nuances often overlooked based on the intersectional lens of race, language and immigration.

I have co-prepared “Computational thinking through transraciolinguistics: Extending critical literacy for racial and civic justice” for Educational Researcher. Two encyclopedic articles titled “Black Englishes” and “Translanguaging in Black immigrant literacies” invited by the international Linguistic and Literacy volumes respectively of the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, demonstrate the impact of my scholarship across these domains in the field.

My efforts to translate this strand of my research into practice for diverse publics has been intentional, spanning national and international associations, outlets, universities, and organizations in response to invitations from outlets such as UNCG, Broward County Library, USF World, AERA, LRA, AAAL, World Literacy Summit, USC, MSU, TESOL BELPAF, and USF COE. I continue to extend this line of research by examining how Black peoples’ intersectional literate pre-migration experiences in the Caribbean provide clarity about their post-migration to the United States through invited chapters to edited books under contract/published with presses such as Wiley-Blackwell (via Dr. Sylvia Melo-Pfeifer, Multilingual Matters (via Dr. Rahat Zaidi), Oxford University Press (via Dr. Edward Shizha), Routledge (via Drs. Talia Esnard, Christina Lou Dobbs & Renee Figuera), and Multilingual Matters (Dr. Ari Sherris).

I wish to continue building solidarity among Black student sub-populations through my resubmission of the previously submitted grant application, “A transraciolinguistic approach for academic and social adjustment of Black American and immigrant youth,” to the William T. Grant Foundation” [$100,000].