Affective Literacies and Material Agency: Immigrant Stories of Belonging and Identity

This study examines how emotional and material entanglements shape the identities of six immigrant women teachers living across Canada. Drawing on qualitative interviews and visual narratives and analyzed through a material-discursive framework (Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1978/2020), the research explores how objects—such as jewelry, coins, and handwritten notes—act as emotional anchors that mediate belonging, literacy practices, and professional identity. Through these affective-material encounters, participants narrate how their emotional connections to objects sustain their resilience, foster multilingual literacy practices, and bridge transnational ties between home and host countries. The findings reveal that literacy development among immigrant educators extends beyond textual practices to include embodied, affective, and material dimensions of meaning-making. By highlighting the agency of emotions and objects in shaping self-perception and pedagogical engagement, this research contributes to new materialist perspectives in applied linguistics and immigrant teacher education. It advances understandings of literacy as a relational practice embedded in emotional and material life, challenging skills-based paradigms and offering implications for inclusive literacy policies and practices that honour teachers’ transnational experiences.