Encountering the world with voice search: A young immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s digital literacies

Abstract

This article explores a 4-year-old recent immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s encounter with voice search technology to understand how assemblages among a young immigrant child, his voice, his family, digital technology, and materials create new possibilities for the understanding of ethnolinguistically marginalized children and families' literacies and digital literacies practices. Data in this article is taken from a larger ethnographic case study and drawn from the child’s home and the preschool classroom. Situated in critical posthumanist scholarship and vital materialism, I show that a child’s unbounded digital and media access and unpredictable encounters through his voice and crossing over languages take part in redistributing the hierarchy of bodies, performances, and productions. Finally, I suggest that understanding children’s use of voice search as one of their key ways of doing literacies and making meaning and noticing the unpredictable, intimate, and playful literacies can help us disrupt the traditional, assimilatory conceptualization of digital literacies.