Diverse Belongings: An Improvisational Inquiry Into Newcomer Worlds, Worldings, and the Literacies of Belonging

Abstract

In an era of unprecedented global forced displacement, this artistic, multimodal dissertation explores experiences of belonging with a group of four adult newcomers to Canada. Using a post qualitative approach, the study couples the theoretical concepts of worlding and wonder with the work of Borderlands poets — non-western authors who write from the margins — to explore the creative texts created by the bi- and multilingual English learners from a decolonial stance. The study’s setting, during the Covid-19 pandemic, was an online translanguaging space, in which the participants’ linguistic, artistic, and multimodal repertoires were leveraged in meaning- making and artmaking, including drawings, paintings, digital photography, video and dual language poetry. Poetic transcripts were generated to re-present the participants’ resettlement stories. The findings reveal how affective and resonant worldings emerged through the serial immersion in experiences of belonging, not-belonging, and deeply felt liminal spaces between- belongings. Unworlding stories exposed disturbing examples of the participants’ loss of voice, of silencing in dominant English spaces, even among newcomers with English language proficiency. This inquiry seeks to contest dominant forms of academic knowledge and expand creative approaches within the post-qualitative paradigm to open new avenues for creative inquiry in language, literacy, and arts-based research.