Embodiesments of water: on plurilingual-pluricultural identities through memory and language learning-teaching

This thesis reveals the embodiesments of water as a metaphorical and methodological current for understanding plurilingual-pluricultural identities across landscapes of memory work, language learning-teaching, and being-becoming. Through arts-based self-study, I weave together narratives of poetry, visual arts, and critical reflections to examine how my personal and professional identities as an artist-researcher-teacher-learner dwell in English, French, and the absences of my heritage languages. Anchored in theoretical shorelines of sociolinguistics, poststructuralism, anticolonial thought, and environmental education, the bodies of my work unsettle monolingual and monocultural paradigms by centering the fluid, relational, and transformeative natures of language-culture identities. Memory work becomes a shoreline where tensions of linguistic insecurities, colonial legacies, and diasporic grieving meet liberations found in plurilanguaging, multimodalities, and anti-oppressive teaching practices. Water, as bodies, metaphor, and teacher sustains this inquiry: it embodies fluidity, opacity, and resilience, while inviting ethical reflection on language learning-teaching in relation to land, community, and justice. This research contributes to plurilingual-pluricultural education by proposing that language learning-teaching can be moving practices of estuarial confluences by joining together histoires, identities, and pedagogies that are continually transformeing.