Chronotopes of Transnational Literacies: How Youth Live and Imagine Social Worlds in their Digital Media Practices

Abstract

This study explores the transnational literacies that contribute to creating online social connections among migrant youth that may support their development and navigation of life across countries. We examine how social connectedness is semiotically constructed through time–space framing among two youth of Chinese descent who were participants of a larger study of the digital media practices of young people in an urban high school. We build on the concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) and scholarship of transnational literacies to understand the space–time dimensions of digital literacy practices, specifically how youth create the spatiotemporal context or frame of reference for their actions and positionings with others across geographical distances. Using a case study approach with data from interviews and observations, we analyzed how the youth depicted their transnational social relations within particular time–space frames. Qualitative and discourse analyses of the youths' narrative accounts show that they positioned themselves in proximity with their transnational peers within particular time–space contexts that supported their actions and emotions, and how they made sense of events, issues, practices, and their own identities as transnational individuals. The youths' ideas of schooling and education, and attunement to nationalistic ideologies, were developed through multiple chronotopes in their social connections across countries. This study offers implications for how an attention to the transnational spatiotemporal frame of youths' discourse and narrative may give us a more nuanced understanding of the subjectivity, knowledge, and perspective they derive from their experiences of movement and connection across borders.