From heavy jacket to jack fruit: a critical cosmopolitanism lens on transmodal digital exchanges between US and Ugandan English language learners

This study examines how English language learners in Uganda and the United States communicate across cultural and material differences through transnational digital video exchanges in the Global StoryBridges (GSB) project. Drawing on transmodal analysis (Hawkins [2021]. Transmodal communications: Transpositioning semiotics and relations. Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.22730497) of 17 student-produced videos and accompanying online discussions, we analyse two focal cases to investigate how students mobilise local linguistic and cultural resources from their everyday environments. We use critical cosmopolitanism (Delanty [2006]. The cosmopolitan imagination: Critical cosmopolitanism and social theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 25–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2006.00092.x; Hawkins [2014]. Ontologies of place, creative meaning making and critical cosmopolitan education. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(1), 90–112. https://doi.org/10.1111/curi.12036) as an analytic lens to identify opportunities for addressing gaps in understanding across these differences in transnational interactions. Our findings suggest that meaningful intercultural exchange depends not only on shared language but on students’ capacity to engage with the materially situated realities that shape meaning-making across contexts. We argue that realising the educational potential of transnational digital platforms requires intentional pedagogical scaffolding that recognises such moments as opportunities and centres student voice, builds structural awareness of global inequality, and opens space for critical cosmopolitan engagement.