Translanguaging, transmodalities and transpositioning are inextricably intertwined concepts, offering innovative analytic perspectives and insightand for understanding communications in this era of increased globalization and communication across diversity. They together capture and connect movements and mobilities, relations and relationalities, and spatio-temporal scales inherent in communications (languaging) in today's world. In brief: transmodalities is a theory of social semiotics, expanding on those such as multiliteracies and multimodality, that subsumes (but fully incorporates) translanguaging, and accounts for 'complexities' in communications across space and difference- between interlocutors from diverse communities, cultures, lifestyles, geographies, ideologies and language varieties. Fully embedding actors in their historic, geographic, cultural and linguistic contexts, it incorporates: signs and modes leveraged in interactions; relations between modes, language and actors (human and non-human); the arc of communication (assemblage, movement, reception, negotiation); contexts and cultures; transnationalism and relations of status and power. Taken together, this enables a robust social semiotic analysis of communications and interactions through the totality of signs, symbols, resources, modes and actors enmeshed in communicative networks and ecologies, within the full scope of the (emplaced, sedimented and shifting) sociocultural, historical, geophysical, ideological and material contexts in which they occur.
Communications, we contend, matter, because they shape, reflect and index social relations. Transpositioning bridges communications and human relations, illuminating the ways in which actors are located in communicative flows across time-space and scales, with their positioning and subjectivities continually shifting within them. Who we are, how we make meaning in communications, how we see the world and understand ourselves and others in it, are always-emergent processes co-constructed with others through social interactions that are situated-or positioned- in particular times and places, between particular people (and things), and located in (and shaped by) particular histories, trajectories and movements of ideas, ideologies, resources, information and goods. Everyone and everything are emplaced in particular ways- positioned- in any interaction, and meanings being made are contingent on that positioning. Transpositioning, then, references new and fluid identifications, subjectivities and positionings that are embedded in new spatial, relational, ideological and semiotic configurations. Importantly, we recognize that emplacements, interactions and relationalities are always fraught with power dynamics, and so we center the notion of critical cosmopolitanism (Hawkins, 2014), with the construction of equitable, open and caring relations (across distance and diversity) foundational to our thinking and aims.
Here we introduce and define our key concepts- translanguaging, transmodalities and transpositioning, demonstrating their heuristic potential through analysis of a transnational WeChat exchange among residents of China and Chinese nationals living outside of China discussing Chinese COVID-19 policies and the 2022 Shanghai lockdown. We show how sociopolitical contexts and realities, political stances, subjectivities, geographical locations, current events, modes of communication, resources leveraged, language/s, histories, relationalities and more shift and flow throughout the (asynchronous) interactions, identifying understandings resulting from the fluid transpositioning that occurs. We demonstrate why it's critical ((in both the sense of important and that of liberatory) to understand relationships between communications and social relations, and how translanguaging, transmodalities and transpositioning support this endeavor.
