Geographies of discourse revisited

This study explores the role of Geographies of Discourse (GoD) (Scollon, Ron. 2013. Geographies of discourse: Action across layered spaces. In Ingrid De Saint-Georges & Jean-Jacques Weber (eds.), Multilingualism and multimodality: Current challenges for educational studies, 183-198. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers) in creating spaces for multilingualism. Building on work that examined the role of multimodality in civic participation (e.g., de Groot and Jocuns 2023. Multimodality as civic participation: The case of Thailand's rap against dictatorship. Journal of Language and Politics 22(1). 107-128) we show how mapping, analyzing and connecting the multimodal geographies of discourse within language portraits and a mapping task in Kurdistan create insight into the historical, present and future linkages that create a network of mobile language repertoires. We discuss how geographies of discourse (GoD) emerged from how multilingualism in Iraqi Kurdistan map these GoD between the different material objects and create historical and future connections that emerge as small stories. Describing and mapping these intersections and transformations reifies Latour's (2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press) notion that neither the material nor the immaterial realizes these transformations or gives meaning to them, instead, the transformative actions and meanings indexed are situated in the social relationships between actors that produce these intersections. We argue that this way of understanding the complex networks of discourse practices that produce GoD is important presently when social interaction is situated in a nexus of online and offline spaces.