Creativity and criticality: Reimagining narratives through translanguaging and transmediation

Abstract

Abstract This paper asserts that creativity and criticality are interlocked constructs that converge through the shared impetus of challenging existing norms, practices and relations of power. Drawing on data from a student YouTube adaptation of a play about Filipino migrants from a literature textbook, it examines how high school students in the Philippines use their linguistic, multimodal and digital resources to retell a prescribed narrative from their own perspectives and contexts. By conducting a multimodal discourse analysis of this video, this paper demonstrates how these youth engage with translanguaging and transmediation, reshaping the meanings of the primary text while imagining spaces like Canada from their own fixed locations in the Philippines. Through these creative and critical processes, they are able to challenge the boundaries of both word and world, and assert their own voices in the discourse of migration and globalization.