Research

My scholarship and pedagogy are informed by my interests in multilingual language practices that move transnationally and generationally. My dissertation, Passing Literacies: Soviet Immigrant Elders and Intergenerational Language Practices, examines how literacies circulate within families across generations and through spaces of migration, with a focus on Soviet immigrants in their 80s and 90s. As a multilingual writer who experienced multiple immigrations and language adjustments, I feel the inquiries in my research deeply. As lifespan literacy research continues to expand in the field of Composition and Rhetoric, the interviews of the elders in my study work to take up and contribute to methodologies that triangulate reading and writing practices across space and time (Compton-Lilly and Halverson; Kell). The inquiries at the root of my dissertation follow the literacy scholars who have recently been complicating the analysis of what happens to language, and further, to literacy practices, when people move through different geopolitical, social, and linguistic landscapes (Alvarez, Canagarajah, Lagman, Lorimer Leonard, Vieira).  Further, the study also uses family as a unit of analysis to look at how values and practices are articulated within this bounded micro-context, how they are passed around, and how they might interact with historical and political conditions that the family is facing.

Passing Literacies aims to understand how people experience reading and writing within the larger histories of their transnational lives, but also how they reconstruct those experiences. By adding to emerging and established transnational literacy research, this projects hopes to give texture to the literacy settings that form, transform and valuate individual immigrant practices. After revising my dissertation into a monograph, I intend to follow this research in my second project by exploring connections between multilingual literacies and citizenship, particularly how language racialization functions within certain transnational literacy communities in the United States.