Intercultural creativity as criticality; exploring ways of knowing through translanguaging, poetry and dúchas in a borderlands space

Abstract In this article, I draw on translanguaging, poetry as knowing and critical pedagogy alongside Anzaldúan informed decolonial feminist thinking and the precolonial Irish Gaelic concept of dúchas, to inform a transdisciplinary intercultural creativity praxis-paradigm. Accordingly, theory and method remain intentionally entangled: beginning from my own culturally informed poetic positionality. I invite the reader to walk with me through the Irish landscape on a path I walk ritually. Guided by dúchas, this walk through the borderlands space of the Glens of Antrim, in the North of Ireland, becomes a process of consciousness-raising wrought through creativity and translanguaging relationality with nature. This approach to knowledge construction recognizes the body, the spirit, the emotions, as well as the mind, as ways of knowing and for reimagining a more just and equitable world. Through poetry, the signs of water and willow tree are re-semioticised to generate critical insights into interculturality as interconnectedness. Such an approach is proposed to carry transformative potential across a range of contexts and applications relevant for Intercultural Studies, Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics.