MRC Speaker: Margaret Hawkins (Wisconsin)

Title: Transmodalities: Conceptualizing semiotic affordances in transnational communications

Abstract: Addressing complexities in transnational new media communications, a transmodalities lens highlights issues such as time, space and scale, and sociocultural border crossing. In this presentation, I utilize the five features of a transmodalities lens (Hawkins, 2018) to analyze digitally-mediated global youth interactions via shared videos and chats in order to demonstrate its affordances for new understandings of semiosis in transnational engagements.

Bio: Margaret R. Hawkins is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Ph.D. program in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work, centered on engaged scholarship around issues of equity and social justice, focuses on languages, literacies and learning in classroom, home, and community-based settings in domestic, global and transnational contexts.