The ways in which migrants express, construct and negotiate their identities reveal a dynamic interplay between their discourses on how they relate to the world and the representations that shape their sense of belonging. In urban contexts, individuals’ plurilingual repertoires and transnational identities display the constant mediation migrants are involved in when they navigate their social trajectories. Migrants’ plurilingual repertoires and practices emphasize the role of language(s) in the exercise of power and illustrate how urban spaces participate in sociolinguistic stratification. However, by crossing borders between languages, cultures and spaces, migrants counterbalance the effects of the segregation that cities may impose on them and set in motion new complex plural affiliations to re-appropriate their life stories. In doing so, they break away from dominant homogeneous social discourses; they cut across the traditional deficit perspective associated with their language practice and give value to plurilingualism.

David Little learned French and German in the UK in a monolingual environment. His research quickly focused on the agency of the learners. Having worked with refugees and then with multilingual schools, involving many languages in the classroom, he rejects translanguaging. Rather, he suggests that collaborative learning tasks should be carried out with different languages in mind.

Francis Bangou chose to fight social injustice by advocating for the empowerment of marginalized groups of learners. His social and academic background, formed from geographical and institutional patchworks of language norms and habits, has led him to reject binary explanations, such as nature versus nurture and speaker versus language, in order  “to recognize that speaker, language, and matter are perpetually becoming other in creative relational and ever changing entanglements.”