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Paper short abstract

This paper showcases multilingual stories from the Translationships project, a community-driven storytelling project in Seattle, US. Through translingual encounters, storytellers showcase epistemological difference and open pathways for ongoing and incomplete relationships with other beings.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on Indigenous storytelling traditions from the Americas (Cusicanqui, 2012; Kimmerer, 2020; Krawec, 2023; Simpson, 2017; Teuton & Shade, 2023) and critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2021), this paper focuses on how storytelling through translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2012) foregrounds epistemological diversity and stands as one of the ways in which resistance to colonial logics is practiced (Wang, 2024). Translingual storytelling can thus contribute to uplifting knowledges essential for environmental justice (Eppelsheimer, Küchler, & Melin, 2015); however, for centuries, the emphasis on monolingualism has prevented us from fully engaging with worldviews that define other beings as sentient and actively mediating our lives in complex relationships. Against this backdrop, the Translationships project, a community-driven multilingual storytelling project in Seattle, US, reminds us that nexus between embodied-materiality and language can be cultivated, generating an array of possible forms of meaning-making. In particular, stories will be explored to understand how translingual encounters of epistemological diversity foreground both interconnectedness and a world of incomplete translations (Nagar, 2019) among species, languages, communities, and places. These “translationships” support the conditions necessary for ongoingness in a damaged world (Haraway, 2016) and for multilingual communities to thrive despite language differences, opens up pathways for expansive relational communication.