Deaf college students’ selves within translanguaging space: protecting self-definitions while enacting flexible communication

Iturriaga, Cristian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0081-8692 (2025) Deaf college students’ selves within translanguaging space: protecting self-definitions while enacting flexible communication. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. pp. 1-14. ISSN 0143-4632

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Abstract

Deaf individuals can enact flexible and complex selves thanks to their access to multiple semiotic resources. These include, but are not limited to, signed, spoken, and written languages and other embodied resources. This qualitative study interviewed four deaf college students to explore relationships between communication experiences, selves, and translanguaging–the use of communication resources unbounded by named languages. Dialogical discourse analysis enabled an understanding of how participants used their multilingual and multimodal repertoires to express nuanced preferences or distance from languages in dialogue with varied recognisable social positions. Participants take discursive positions that make evident the dominance of spoken English in their lives, reflecting a longing for alternative, more inclusive ways of arranging communication. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of considering how sensory orientations shape communication preferences and selves in deaf college students.