Exploring multilingual writer agency through autoethnography: bargaining, resistance and translingual reality

Agency during translingual writing is closely connected with multilingual communicators’ identity and ideology. While previous research has explored the role of agency during translingual writing, there is a lack of inward investigation turning multilingual researchers themselves into research sites and studying their lived multilingual written communication. This autoethnographic study fills the void by looking inward at how I, a multilingual writing teacher and researcher of colour, adopted agency to navigate written communication in academia and what opportunities and challenges arose in the process. Data include my research statement for tenure and promotion, written feedback from my colleagues, journal reflections on my tenure and promotion statement writing process, and related written artefacts. My findings indicate that while I was able to adopt agency in actively resisting ‘standard’ English norms in my written communication, I remained under the pressure from the strong hold of monolingual ideologies in academia. Implications of the study shed light on the importance of critical self-inquiry about agency during the multilingual writing process, which facilitates further discussion about how multilingual writers could agentively negotiate ‘standard' English norms while engaging in translingual meaning-making.