How can we take transnationality as a space of in-betweenness to generate new possibilities, moving beyond geographically bounded spans between countries? This article presents five authors’ collective inquiry on transnational positionalities, which we practiced through the relational, transformative, and reflective writing of the self in a community space. We staged the collaborative writing into two processes: the emergent process of thematic writing and the relay writing. Interweaving “I” and “we” voices that cannot be captured through categorical thinking, our collaborative quest resists normative identity politics, proposing writing as a method of collective inquiry for the nuanced understanding of the transnationality that embraces flows, margins, and uncertainties. Collaborative writing, we argue, is a transformative opportunity for methodologizing transnationality and decolonizing qualitative inquiry.

In this article, we—three Asian MotherScholars in the field of language and literacy education—conducted a collaborative self-study to examine how our individual and shared experiences as transnational mothers of emergent bilinguals have shaped our ways of promoting bilingualism and biliteracy. Our study drew on transnational feminist perspectives and used multimodal data and narratives shared in an online inquiry group. We highlighted ways we leverage our strengths and make conscious efforts to navigate burdens rooted in monolingual ideologies and linguistic hegemony as we raise our bilingual children. We also found how inquiring collectively into our experiences has helped us cultivate critical consciousness and build transnational solidarity. Through our stories, we emphasized the urgency of challenging inequities and pervasive monolingual ideologies within U.S. schools, as well as the necessity of creating a space for immigrant mothers to inquire into their experiences and to support each other.

This online ethnographic study illuminates how Korean immigrant mothers of children with disabilities use their capitals to communicate, build community, and share resources in an online space. Employing the construct of community cultural wealth (CCW) , we analyzed posts and comments by the mothers in an online forum on a transnational website. Findings revealed that the mothers actively (1) leverage their linguistic capital for sharing information and experience; (2) support each other through building a social network; and (3) cultivate aspirational capital through sharing feelings and empathy. This study counters the deficit-oriented paradigm on immigrant mothers of children with disabilities and reframes mothers as advocates who build community to collaboratively navigate their parenting journeys. This study also calls attention to the transnational network of capitals that immigrant mothers collaboratively build and encourages researchers and professionals to inquire into ways to better support immigrant mothers and their children.