Research Article Andrew Jocuns* and Freek Olaf de Groot Geographies of discourse revisited https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2024-0112 Received December 10, 2024; accepted December 11, 2024; published online January 3, 2025 Abstract: 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 dictator- ship. 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. Keywords: identity; Kurdistan; language portrait; liminality map tasks; multilingualism; multimodality 1 Introduction This paper revisits an idea originally developed by Ron Scollon (2013) in his later academic career, Geographies of Discourse, or GoD for short as we have taken up the idea. GoD is a theoretical notion that builds on the concept of Nexus of Practice (Scollon 1998, 2001) and aims to expand the study of a NoP by elucidating the linkages, semiotic trajectories and practices between the various NoP in society. In doing so, it makes visible the entanglements of NoP both through their physical linkages as well as their socio-cultural linkages. In revisiting this notion, we apply it to the multilingual turn in examining multimodal data collected from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to illustrate how multilingual social actors relate languages or ways of speaking to places, spaces, practices and mobilities. We specifically focus on the Geographies of Discourse that link these moments and multilingual practices and the affordances and constraints these geographies bring about. Our original impetus for this study had to do with a recently published paper that examined how multimodality is a form of civic participation. In that paper, we examined the multiple modes of communication that were afforded in a political rap video “ประเทศกม ” or “My Country Has” from Thailand posted by the rap group Rap Against Dictatorship. What we noticed from this social media post was how the action of uploading the video in a time of heavy public censorship in Thailand seemed to be the impetus for other similar multimodal mediated actions, not only within Thailand but in other countries as *Corresponding author: Andrew Jocuns, MA TESOL Program, College of Education, Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou, China, E-mail: jocunsa@gmail.com. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6787-4613 Freek Olaf de Groot, Applied Linguistics, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Suzhou, China. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6710-0968 Multimodal Commun. 2024; aop