LLC41: Code-Meshing

Collaborative Goals

Code-meshing engages often unfamiliar or underrepresented languages, cultures, and ways of knowing. Our working group seeks to explore how, in writing and through the use of mixed modalities, code-meshing is more than a method for promoting DEI. By also foregrounding identity and literacy (Lam, 2000; Young & Martinez, 2011), code-meshing combines the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion with an ear to subjectivity, voice, and writers' linguistic realities (Horner et al., 2011; Lee, 2014; Royster, 1996; Villanueva, 2013). While ample scholarship has focused on teaching code-meshing as a rhetorical skill and strategy for effective communication and validation of languages and linguistic backgrounds (Canagarajah, 2013; Savini, 2021; Young et al., 2014), our working group explores the following topics:

• how reading and analyzing code-meshed texts can be used as an intentional writing pedagogy method,
• how code-meshing encourages writers and readers to perceive how languages have been marginalized and to engage with unknown epistemologies,
• how learning code-meshing allows writers and readers to see the value in retrieving and using these languages for their inherent socio-cultural and scientific insights, and
• how code-meshing can be used in first-year and upper-level writing intensive classes across disciplines (e.g., humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences).

We’ll lead a weekly online writing & reading group to discuss our research in code-meshing and code-meshing pedagogy. In the fall, we will attend a conference related to our scholarship and will hold virtual half-day writing retreats in Sept. and Nov. In the spring, we’ll hold virtual half-day writing retreats in Feb. and Apr. We’ll have a weekend in-person writing retreat in Feb/Mar. These writing retreats will be used to build upon collaborative writing completed last year and continue to prepare our meta-analysis article and additional writing on code-meshing pedagogy for publication.