Traveling Literacies: Writing Among Languages and Locations

This dissertation uses an empirical, qualitative approach to multilingual writing to capture the lived experience of writing across more than one language and location in the world. The study uses grounded theory methodology, drawing on in-depth interviews to analyze the experiences of 25 multilingual immigrant women who have moved across geographic locations, but also move across multiple languages and literacies as a matter of everyday practice. The complex diversity of this group of writers, from 17 countries collectively speaking 22 languages guides an analysis not of a specific cultural community or individual language, but of the phenomenon of multilingual writing itself. Tracing the movement of immigrants and their writing practices shows how literate movement---multilingualism---interacts with social and physical movement---migration and its social effects. This explicit mobile analysis reveals 1) literate practices moving against social structures, 2) globalizing social structures moving in on practices, and 3) destabilized literate resources and repertoires.;The dissertation's analysis focuses on the interrelation of social and literate mobility and the instability of traveling literacies, showing how the value and effects of writers' literate practices shift as they travel. Further analysis focuses on mobile resources and repertoires, showing what these resources look like as literacy practices and how writers adapt and act with these resources as they travel. This analysis demonstrates that literacy practices on the move create rhetorical attunement---an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference and multiplicity. Multilingual writers aren't aware of this quality a priori, but come to know---become rhetorically attuned---across a lifetime of communicating across difference.;Throughout the dissertation, multilingual writers' literacy and language experiences prove to be uneven activities, the social and political value of which is not secure or guaranteed, but is highly dependent on time, place, and condition. Writers in this study do not write from a static repertoire of skills, but instead create and adapt literate resources in motion, traveling with highly charged experiences, values, and beliefs that influence the ways in which they are or are not able to call on their literate resources as they travel across languages and locations.