2025 The English Scholars Beyond Borders: Quality Education (SDG4) in the Glocal and LoGlobal Era

Collaborative Autoethnographic Investigation of Four Authors’ Multilingual Writing Agency

Conference website: https://2025esbb.ndhu.edu.tw/

Theron Muller – Waseda University, Japan
Ms. Sofia Koursarou – Waseda University, Japan
Ms. María Jiménez Otálora – Waseda University, Japan

1 November, 2025, 11:40 – 12:00

Our Slides

Abstract

This investigation uses collaborative autoethnography to explore our agency in our multilingual writing through the following research question: How is our agency as writers shaped by our multilingual writing, broadly defined? Based in Japan from various language backgrounds, we explore how we move between our home languages, English, and Japanese in our everyday writing experiences. The types of writing investigated are broad, widening the focus beyond academic writing to consider writing of all forms, including emails and handwritten documents such as application forms. As such, collaborative autoethnography is an effective methodological tool to facilitate reflecting on our multilingual writing practices, creating a narrative that transcends our individual experiences to describe a fuller picture of our multilingual writing and agency as multilinguals living in Japan. We also critically interrogate commonly used labels, exploring how as writers we construct our identities and agencies in the context of the larger ecosystem in which forces constrain and facilitate different aspects of our agency. We focus on understanding how we agentively situate ourselves within the larger ecologies we are embedded in and how we agentively resituate ourselves as we move within and between different multilingual writing spaces. The collaborative, dialogic nature of collaborative autoethnography facilitates creating a shared, supportive space in which alternative narratives that challenge predominant status quo understandings can be expressed, explored, and supported. As such, it is particularly well-placed to develop understandings of author agency anchored in our personal understanding of our experience.