Suicide candy: tracing the discourse itineraries of food risk

Traditional approaches to the way people react to food risks often focus on ways in which the media distort information about risk, or on the deficiencies in people’s interpretation of this information. In this chapter Jones offers an alternative model which sees decisions regarding food risk as taking place at a complex nexus where different people, texts, objects and practices, each with their own histories, come together. Based on a case study of a food scandal involving a particular brand of Chinese candy, Jones argues that understanding why people respond the way they do to food risk requires tracing the itineraries along which different people, texts, objects and practices have traveled to converge at particular moments, and understanding the kinds of concrete social actions that these convergences make possible

Creativity in language learning and teaching: translingual practices and transcultural identities

This introduction explores the four main themes related to creativity in language learning and teaching: 1) ‘language, languaging and translanguaging’ 2) ‘mobility and space’ 3) ‘transcultural identities’ and 4) ‘institutional and individual constraints on creativity’, and discusses how engagement with these themes helps the authors to move beyond traditional notions of linguistic creativity and creative pedagogy to formulate new ways of imagining creativity in language learning based on encouraging learners to make use of the full range of their semiotic resources and social experiences when communicating

Vernacular mobile literacies: multimodality, creativity and cultural identity

This paper focuses on how advanced learners of English at a woman’s college in Saudi Arabia use Snapchat to communicate with their classmates. It examines not just the way the English language becomes a meaning making resource in these exchanges, but also how English is strategically mixed with photos, drawings, emoji’s, and other languages to create meanings, identities, and relationships. The theoretical framework used to understand these strategies is adopted from Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) model of ‘geosemiotics’, an approach to discourse that focuses on how meanings (as well as identities and relationships) are created through the ways semiotic resources are arranged in physical space. The analysis highlights how Snapchat creates opportunities for female learners of English in Saudi Arabia to open up new ‘cultural spaces’, and how these spaces can facilitate their language learning. At the same time, it is argued, these new ‘cultural spaces’ are contingent on the various creative ways these learners make use of physical space. Implications for understanding the relationship between creativity and translanguaging are discussed