Creating translanguaging affirmative space through artifactual literacies: Towards addressing power imbalance with multilingual parents

Researching migrant and multilingual parents’ literacy practices with their children is ethically complex due to the dominant discourses of language and literacy which devalue such practices as irrelevant or deficient. Translanguaging theory and the related concept of translanguaging space offer opportunities to consider dialogue with multilingual parents differently, valuing their literacy practices in the interview space. Drawing on data from an artifactual literacies study with multilingual parents, the paper discusses three aspects which contributed to reframing the interview as translanguaging affirmative space: the value of artefacts brought by the parents in relating their lived experiences; the role of semantic maps as shared multilingual writing; and the use of multilingual transcribing. It is argued that through these practices, a translanguaging affirmative space was co-produced which contributed to reducing the power imbalance inherent in research. It is further argued that such translanguaging space can be co-produced by researcher and participant, even when they do not share a home language.