1 Translingual Literacies in a Social Media Age: Lessons Learned from Youth’s Transnational Communication Online José Ramón Lizárraga, Glynda Hull, John Scott We live in an interconnected world, awash in flows, with capital, people, information, texts, languages, and media moving, shifting, and blending across geographic, cultural, and political borders (Appadurai, 1996; cf. Beck, 2000; Maira & Soep, 2005.). Appadurai, who earlier most powerfully articulated the nation-spanning, border-crossing potential of current patterns of globalization, has recently emended this metaphor of flows, acknowledging not just smooth circulations, but “global bumps, borders, black holes, and quarks, the diacritics of the new global order” (2013, p.1; 2006). We write this chapter knowing that the migration of people and the movement of texts are everywhere, bringing changes, and perceptions of changes, to demographic and semiotic landscapes (Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Vertovec, 2007). Our interest is to explore the implications of these changes for conceptions and practices of literacy, including academic versions (cf. Canagarajah, 2002; Luke, 2003; Stornaiuolo, Hull, & Nelson, 2009). Global flows are uneven and unequal, and their impacts on the lives of most, uncertain, making paramount the role of creative, critical, and ethically alert educations for the widest spectrum of citizenry. As North American educators and researchers, we hope to contribute to understandings of the transnational language and literacy practices of youth within the U.S. and elsewhere, in such a way as to make conceptions of literacy both responsive to and transformative of our changing world (Hull, Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009). While multilingual and multimodal language and literacy practices have long been part of many communities’ communicative repertoires (Canagarajah, 2013 a,b; Finnegan, 2002), those practices have of late intensified and transformed through the mediation of digital tools and connectivities, wherever these resources are available. However, most conceptions of language, literacy, and learning in U.S. schools have yet to take such shifts into account, remaining persistently monolingual, logocentric, and constrained by the histories, conventions, and demands of specific institutional contexts (Canagarajah, 2011; May, 2014; Street, 2014). Nowhere is this more apparent than in discussions of “academic language” and “academic literacies,” which still tend to position students’ everyday and evolving semiotic practices as peripheral, marooned on the outside of those language and literacy practices that are inculcated in formal school contexts and deemed legitimate and valuable. In this chapter we call for a broadening of conceptions of what count as valuable and essential literacy to include translingual, transmodal, and trans-presentational practices, which include creating, negotiating, transforming, and sharing texts across multiple codes, channels, and symbol systems. We refer to those who are learning to participate in semiotic “contact zones” (Pratt, 1991; cf. Canagarajah, 2002)—that is, to create and circulate and interpret texts across diverse and asymmetric contexts, languages, ideologies, and modalities—as “emergent translinguals” (building from Garcia’s term, 2009, “emergent bilinguals”). We believe that their experiences can inform thinking about academic literacies, loosening the grip of a singular institutional context, and foregrounding how texts function in the world and how people engage them in a range of settings. At the same time, our youthful informants and their translingual, transmodal language practices lay bare values, strivings, and transgressions that obviate any belief that communication across difference is automatically or easily achieved.