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Innovative Qualitative Methodologies in Multilingual Literacy Development Research: Amplifying voices from immigrant, transnational, and refugee communities
Edited by Amanda K. Kibler and Fares J. Karam
[Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 11] 2025
► pp. 149–170

Chapter 8
Families’ literacies of (in)visibilty

Methodological approaches to understanding precarity without culpability

 | University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
 | Rutgers University
In our ethnographic research with mixed-status transborder families who had relocated from the U.S. to parents’ hometowns in México, we have sought to better understand what we term transborder literacies of (in)visibility, or diasporic people’s innovative interactions around texts that prepare them to move across incompatible, racializing mononational institutions divided by borders (Gallo & Adams Corral, 2023). In this chapter we adopt a transborder literacies of (in)visibility framework to trouble and unpack our research methodologies. We turn this lens to our research practices to better understand instances where transborder families’ actions challenged us as researchers to think through the colonial roots of our own literacies and thinking.
Keywords: transborder, colonialism, undocumentedness, families, reflexivity, immigration, literacies
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Confronting colonial logics
    • Extending reflexivity
  • Overview of the study and its findings
    • Beginning with a transborder lens
      • Transborder literacies of (in)visibility
    • Our research studies
      • Reflexivity in dialogue
  • Methodological discussion: Rethinking theory for more equitable research
    • Un-documenting transborder subalternity
      • What we don’t write in our field notes
      • Siempre hay una raíz
    • Centering transborder knowledges, challenging colonial logics
      • Mis(sed) deliveries
      • Navigating institutions and shifting (in)visibility practices
  • Implications for qualitative research on multilingual literacy development
    • Researcher literacies of subalternities
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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