Translanguaging as a Tool for Decolonizing Interactions in a Space for Confronting Inequalities1 Práticas Translíngues como uma ferramenta para decolonizar interações em um espaço para confrontação de desigualdades

Taking into account the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, from the UN, this article addresses the construction of artistic contexts where students, teachers, principals, coordinators, sign language interpreters, artists, and researchers work together with the Sustainable Development Goal 10 Reduce inequality within and among countries, in a Project entitled Digitmed Program. This project gathers deaf and hearing, migrants and Brazilian participants from very poor and wealthy communities in discussions about the development of interdisciplinary curriculums, which aim at de-encapsulation of ideas, contents, roles, perspectives, grades, languages spoken, economic background, among others. In this article, 1. This research was supported by CNPq and Pipeq. 2. PEPG Linguística Aplicada e Estudos da Linguagem. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. São Paulo – Brasil. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7165-646X. E-mail: liberali@uol.com.br. 3. School of Education. University of Leeds. Leeds – United Kingdom. https://orcid. org/0000-0001-5482-6009. E-mail: R.A.Swanwick@education.leeds.ac.uk.


Introduction
We live in a world that poses many ethical and geopolitical challenges in respect to how we deal with the inequalities of the present society. There has been an increase in the development of differences between rich and poor countries and social groups, democracy and autocracy, information and ignorance, justice and injustice which imposes s radically excluding patterns of living and being. According to Mignolo (2015, p. 461), we still live a form of coloniality which is manifested in the racism and patriarchy that "governs cognitive, ethic, esthetic, religious, economic, political, among other types of decisions 36.3 and classifi cations 4 ". It creates increasing exploitation, violence, wars, oppressions, injustice and extreme inequalities. All this is accentuated by the reality of a devastating disease (COVID 19) which has recently posed more threats than ever to all humanity. This paper examines Mignolo's concept of a grammar of decolonialism, where an open space for learning with and from the other is mandatory, and where it is possible to overcome the ignorance of different forms of living, being and feeling which prevent the development of our human agency (Miglievich-Ribeiro, 2014). We ask what it takes to be remade as decolonized subjects (Mignolo, 2015) and to effect a decolonization of economic, political, religious, esthetic aspects of living.
According to Míguez Passada, this requires the analysis of discourses that enables refl ection about "what was said and not said, how it was said and the sensations and perceptions that mediate the people, who are raising their experiences, their pains, their joys, their expectations, etc" (2019, p. 6).
In this context, this article poses the question: how can multiple voices in society be heard, valued and empowered?
Using a translanguaging framework we analyze the interaction among participants of a university-school project that gathers hearing and deaf, migrant and Brazilian students, teachers, principals, coordinators and researchers in the discussion of interdisciplinary curriculum proposals for de-encapsulation. Most of these participants experience marginalization as individuals or groups in a society where their voices are not heard or acknowledged. Many of them experience what Liberali (2020) has been calling necroeducation in parallel to the idea of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2016). Necropolitics is seen as the power of governments to decide who will live and who will die and how they will do it. Similarly, necroeducation can be understood as a type of educational system in which some decide who will succeed and who will fail the educational system based on their economic potential. 4. Free translation of : "gobernaba las decisiones y las clasifi caciones cognoscitivas, éticas, estéticas, religiosas, económicas y políticas, entre otras". Fernanda Liberali, Ruth Swanwick The rules of social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, expose entrenched societal inequalities and the gap between those who have and those who do not, directly confl icting with the concept of meritocracy. In this diffi cult time, some students from the private institutions in Brazil have access to all kinds of activities through multiple platforms and remote applications, while students from public institution, living in remote locations or in more impoverished contexts ,were left with nothing to eat and almost no access to any form of education. In other words, they were left to live the death-in-life, expressed by Mbembe (2016).
Translanguaging in this iniquitous context refers to the different ways in which individuals draw on a range of language resources to make meaning, without adherence to (named) language boundaries and according to the social circumstances (Heller, 2007;Makoni & Pennycook, 2006;Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015). This concept represents a shift away from defi ning language use in terms of separate languages and provides a framework to explore linguistic practices in a way that does not "imagine languages as clear cut entities" (Busch, 2012, p. 507) but that pays attention to the linguistic resources that people possess and deploy according to context and audience.
Translanguaging seems to contribute to a process of deencapsulation, understood as the expansion of participants' horizons of action on top of the functions and tasks currently assigned to them, creating foundations for the development of mobility . It involves the construction of school proposals in order to break representational limits and promote new forms of being, acting, feeling, knowing. The development of curricular de-encapsulation may enable the understanding of how school knowledge, usually fi xed and marked by unique and absolute true perspectives, can be overcome with what Santos (2008) calls a knowledge ecology, derived from different sources. In this sense, learning processes are thought to happen outside of capsules when it comes to talking about the participants, the sources, the media and the educational institution itself.
The paper begins with a critique of translanguaging as a conceptual framework for understanding and describing communication in a multilingual world and for the purposes of this project. We then 36.3 2020 describe the context of Digitmed Program and present the analyses of two episodes from the 2019 version of the project where participants worked with interdisciplinary artistic tasks to live a soiree, aiming at the development of the Sustainable Development Goal 10.
Our analysis centers on two episodes that illustrate the different ways in which translanguaging practices, in a de-encapsulated paradigm, can support a decolonized involvement of all the different participants in artistic and educational project activities.
Our concluding discussion refl ects on the role of translanguaging for decolonizing interactions and creating what Freire called the "viable unheard of".

Translanguaging in culturally diverse societies
In order to participate fully in the different spaces, subjects need to develop mobility, that is, the possibility to move within different contexts with the semiotic resource to be accepted, respected, effective. Moving around involves the mobility of linguistic and other semiotic resources in time and space, as stated by Blackledge and Creese (2017). Mobility also involves temporal and spatial trajectories of human actions, that is, language in motion, with various spatiotemporal frames interacting with one another (Blommaert, 2010). In this sense, Pennycook (2012) explains how place and locality become less important than the fl ows of people and languages through the landscape.
To have mobility, subjects need to learn how to activate the collective resources available to them at a certain point in time (Blommaert, 2013). In other words, as pointed out by Blommaert and Backus (2011), subjects need to access their repertoire taking into account their social and cultural itineraries in order to maneuver and navigate with them and to learn how to place themselves in the different social scenes they inhabit or visit. Busch (2015) expands this idea of repertoire to a range of choices available to a speaking subject, not limited only by grammatical rules and knowledge of social conventions. Going even further, Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) state that repertoires can be viewed both from the perspective of individual trajectories (with all the social, historical, political, economic, and cultural effects this may entail) and also from the perspective of the resources at play in a particular place.
The concept of repertoire has thus evolved to keep pace with the expanding linguistic diversity and language practices of communities where the interaction across and between social groupings and cultures gives rise to increasingly dynamic and mobile language practices (Blommaert & Backus, 2012;Vertovec, 2007). In this context repertoire is understood to mean the embodiment of the experiential and practical ways people deploy their resources in different social spaces. This encompasses multidimensional constellation of linguist resources, values, and practices that are "attached to an individual life and a life experience" (Blommaert, 2008, p. 16) and all of the "constructs and narratives therein" (Blackledge & Creese, 2010, p. 224).
According to Bakhtin (1981) in order to become a human being, subjects engage with the words of the others (their voices) and assimilate them, in the historical fl ow of social relationships and struggles. Blackledge and Creese (2017) emphasize that this ideological process of becoming is ever-present and ongoing. And, in this, translanguaging has an essential impact. It enables bringing into play voices which may index participants' localities, social histories, circumstances, and identities. García and Wei (2014, p. 22) state that translanguaging has to do with "speakers' construction and use of original and complex interrelated discursive practices that cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditional defi nition of a language, but that make up the speakers' complete semiotic repertoire". Besides, translanguaging involves, for Canagarajah (2013), an idea that communication transcends individual languages and involves different semiotic resources. For the author, a language is not limited to a semiotic resource among those available, but all the semiotic resources that work together in the construction of meaning.
From a pedagogical perspective, García (2009) defi nes translanguaging as the possibility of giving voice to minorities. In this regard, translanguaging possesses a transformative power and the potential to remove an idea of hierarchy between languages. It is connected to the constant adaptation of resources in the service of meaning-making and 36.3 2020 in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual social spaces (García & Sylvan, 2011).
In the context of deaf-hearing interaction Swanwick (2017) defi nes repertoire as ways of knowing and using sign and spoken/ written languages that are shaped by personal biographies and that are constantly in fl ux and describes deaf-hearing translanguaging as the fl exible use of these repertoires for meaning making. She states that language learning and use can be seen as social, cultural and linguistic experiences which are infl uenced by individual, social and contextual infl uences. Language practices and repertoires evolve because of them. The author points out the need to talk about the plurality of languages and the resources to make meaning. In this sense, to view language as a practice or as the activity of languaging located in context demands an understanding of the dynamisms of what one does with language and how, by it, identities and relationships with others can be created. In this respect, following Gárcia and Wei's perspective (2014), Swanwick (2017, p. 16) understands translanguaging as "the ways in which individuals 'pool' their language knowledge to construct something new in order to make meaning".
Using this framework we examine translanguaging as a tool for, or expression of, decolonization in deaf-hearing interactions in the multilingual space of the Digitmed Program: A particular space for learning that focuses on social, political, economic, cultural, educational and ethical injustices. The following section presents the context of the project and how it is organized.

The Project
The Digitmed Program 5 , which started in 2013 as an international research project, is a non-profi t, research-based project, organized with a multicultural group of hearing and deaf people of different ages, nationalities, ethnicities and economic and social classes. The project aims to join different school participants to develop projects in their communities and learn together how to expand their actions in 5. Over the years the research project has received fi nancial support from the following sources: Marie Curie Foundation, FAPESP, CNPq, PIPEq and PIPAD. broad territories, with repertoires that enable transformative agentive activities. Digitmed participants include masters, doctors, master and doctoral students from two programs at Pontifi cal Catholic University of São Paulo -PUCSP), as well as researchers from different universities such as USP, UFPE, UEPI; school managers, teachers and students of public and private schools; sign language interpreters and parents.
It brings together participants from different schools in the state of São Paulo from different contexts (schools in favelas, elite schools, schools for the deaf, schools with immigrants). It aims to promote the development of interdisciplinary curriculums through the experience of de-encapsulated proposals. In order to do so, it works through the creation of dramatic events that enhance personal experiences in search of social transformations.
The project is organized through monthly meetings that take place in an auditorium on the premises of the PUCSP once a month, always on Saturdays, from 9:00a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The meetings are the triggers for the periodical activities developed in each of the schools.
In 2019, the monthly meetings had the motto of overcoming social inequalities, based on the Sustainable Development Goal 10 -Reduce inequality within and among countries. The meetings were organized based on experiences in the artistic fi eld: literary soiree, slam battles, adaptations of the literary work "The Miserables" by Victor Hugo, theater, Graphite, among others. In this sense, participants were invited to join activities that aimed at understanding, criticizing, and planning forms of intervening in their school contexts and in their neighborhoods using arts. Participants engaged in performative activities to creatively develop ways to overcome constraints and face confl ict as the force that moves everyone beyond their immediate reality (Freire, 1970).
At each of these meetings, Digitmed participants experienced the artistic and cultural manifestations and discussed the issues of social inequality that permeate each of them. By living and discussing, the group re-signifi ed the forms of participation in these activities, discovering and creating new possibilities to live them in school, in the community and also in society, as critical agents, activists and transformers.

36.3
For the purpose of this article, two episodes from one meeting of 2019 were selected. They were chosen as a means to exemplify how participants joined the activities and how their voices were taken into consideration for the construction of meaning and as an attempt to move beyond their initial status.

Analysis
In order to respond to our main question how can multiple voices in society be heard, valued and empowered, this article draws on the multimodal analysis of the fi rst meeting of 2019 to evaluate: • the multimodal resources, life experiences and perspectives that participants brought to the scene, including gestures, postures, types of knowledge, familiarity with certain traditions and ways of acting, • the different ways in which participants attempted to share and understand difference e.g. place themselves in the scene expressing together similar emotional states, • how meaning making and sharing is facilitated by translanguaging.
The analysis initiates with the description of the meeting as a means to understand the activity developed with participants and emphasizes two episodes involving the interaction between deaf and hearing participants 6 .
6. The forms of data collection and presentation were authorized by the participants, according to the ethical rules established by the research committee of PUC-SP. Sharing a performatic poem created in small groups with the big group three teachers, one deaf student, fi ve students from different schools, with varying ages and two interpreter-researchers presenting to the whole audience of participants 2 Presentation in the performatic soiree by a deaf student One deaf student, one deaf teacher who used to be a student in the project, all the other participants as the audience.

The Literary Soiree Meeting, 2019
For the fi rst meeting of 2019, the topic of the year, defying social inequalities, was developed through experiences with poetry in the recreation of soirees. Participants had the opportunity to play with different materials that described or exemplifi ed how soirees were conducted or developed throughout history and in different cultures. They engaged with activities, texts, videos, fi lms and made descriptions of the activity of soiree with the help of the triangle that represents an activity in the Activity Theory perspective as developed by Yrjo Engeström, in 1987.

First Task
For the fi rst task, participants were invited to connect different pieces of different versions of a famous Brazilian poem Canção do Exílio (The song of exile 7 ), by Gonçalves Dias. Each version written 7. The song of exile: My homeland has many palm-trees and the thrush-song fi lls its air; no bird here can sing as well as the birds sing over there. We have fi elds more full of fl owers and a starrier sky above, we have woods more full of life and a life more full of love. Lonely night-time meditations please me more when I am there; my homeland has many palm-trees and the thrush-song fi lls its air. Such delights as my land offers Are not found here nor elsewhere; lonely night-time meditations please me more when I am there; My homeland has many palm-trees and the thrush-song fi lls its air. Don't allow me, God, to die without getting back to where I belong, without enjoying the delights found only there, without seeing all those palm-trees, hearing thrush-songs fi ll the air. at different historical moments discussed the description of the country from different perspectives and with different purposes. After they discussed in small groups the theme of the poems, their contexts, and different versions, they were invited to create their own version and a performance to present it to the big group.

Episode 1
In one of the groups where hearing participants and a deaf student, Isaac, were presenting, the choice was for one of the teachers to read the poem while another participant (a student) would touch the others who had different poses. The poem initiated with a very destructive perspective and each time a participant was touched, s/he would go down on her/his knees. The last one to be touched was the deaf student. Pictures 1 and 2 shows the hearing participant touching the deaf student and looking at the interpreter to check if and when he should move down so that the deaf student could also go down to create the idea of depression infused by the poem.
Picture 1 -hearing student touches deaf student. In this fi rst scene of episode one it is possible to see students making use of gestures and their familiarity with the presence of interpreters in order to create the scene of the performance. Both deaf and hearing students try to express together similar emotional states and understand that they need to rely on different resources in order to do so. Translanguaging here happens through the gestures, the imitation of the movement and resorting to the interpreter. Through these means the students manage to convey to the audience the general meaning they are trying to invest the scene with: depression. As the poem changed the tone to a more hopeful perspective, another participant (interpreter-researcher) joined in and invited participants one by one to stand (as in picture 3).
Picture 3 -Interpreter-researcher invites participants to stand.
Putting her hands up and following the tone of the poem being read, the interpreter-researcher gets closer to each participant who cheerfully stands. This goes on till the deaf student who needs no support to understand the procedure to follow. In this scene again, the gestures had a great impact in the performance of all individuals and made it possible for the deaf student and hearing participants to create the performance together.
Picture 4 shows participants all standing in a more excited perspective. All the others cheered them both clapping and doing the sign for clapping.

Picture 4 -Congratulating the group
An important aspect to be discussed is that although, like all the other performances, the poem created and performed was read by someone, the performance of this group focuses essentially on the absence of sounds being made by the various participants. Body movement, gestures, and proxemics were combined in a translanguaging perspective that made it possible for all to create and understand the poem and the feelings the performers wanted to provoke in the audience. Different participants (hearing student, teacher and interpreter-researcher) assumed main roles in the performance, by choosing what they wanted to do and how they preferred to participate. In this they resorted to their life experiences in order to make it possible for all the different roles in the performance to be created. Fernanda Liberali, Ruth Swanwick In this activity, it is possible to see that the text was created with different interrelated modes to create the meaning the group intended to express. First, the presenters' facial expressions and gestures helped to convey the feeling of depression expressed by the poem. The tone of voice used by the reader was fi rst very gloomy, changing into a more cheerful and happier one by the end, just as the facial expressions and gestures did as well. Similarly, the student who performed the destructive tone used very heavy gestures, moving slowly and smugly looking at each person. On the contrary, the interpreter-researcher who performed the more hopeful tone had ample and faster movements, throwing up her arms as if to invite the others to do the same.
The performance construed a collective social stance which shows a contrast to the positions normally presented in colonized contexts. Involving and allowing different resources in the production of the poem, the ensemble created a contrast to the conventional ways of producing art and opened perspectives on how to use translanguaging to contribute to the development of human activist agency.

Last activity
In the last activity of the meeting, participants were invited to bring their contributions (already requested before the meeting) to the soiree that was enacted and conducted by the 19-year-old researcher -João. He is a student who had participated in the project in previous years and who, after graduating from high school in the year before, decided to join the researchers' group. Taking the position of a host, João invited presenters to the front of the auditorium for their participation. The pictures 6 below show participants in their presentations: Picture 5 -João invites participants to present. During the presentations, students, teachers, principals, researchers either recited a poem of their own or one they liked very much from different authors. While poems were being recited the sign language interpreters were signing for the deaf students.
All participants had a chance to share their life experiences through different media, using gestures, tone of voice, rhythm, word choices, prompts, costumes in order to share their ideas. Adults, young people, teens and kids made their performance a means to express opinions on racism, homophobia, poverty, misogyny, religious repression, among others -different kinds of oppression they had experienced. The audience reacted crying, cheering, clapping, shouting the presenters' name and using the funny jokes that are part of the group repertoire. Diversity was worked through the different means, such as samba lyrics, traditional poems, slams, personal reports in poetic format, songs, that helped express the different voices.

Episode 2
During this fi nal task, when the deaf student decided to recite his poem, the Digitmed coordinator suggested that he do it in sign language only fi rst and later he would do it again with interpretation, if necessary. The idea was that participants would give their whole attention to the deaf participant who was a student at that time (Isaac has fi nished high school and now acts as a researcher at his old school, just like João). Apart from him, there was also another deaf participant, Bruna, who used to study at his school but had now graduated from Pedagogy at university and who also joined the meeting regularly.
The request to avoid interpretation in the fi rst moment aimed at challenging participants to go beyond their comfort zone and try to engage with sign language as a form of constructing meaning. Although all events have interpreter to mediate the relationship between deaf and hearing participants, sign language is frequently marginalized as the main support for interaction since the great majority of the participants either have few contact with deaf people and some are meeting a deaf person for the fi rst time at the project. The challenge aimed at participants exercising their power of translanguaging in order to make meaning and share experiences.

Pictures 7 -Different angles of Isaac's performance
Isaac's presentation, with his ideas, facial expressions, gestures and movements, tries to convey to the group his emotions in relation to the language issues that have created constraints or possibilities for his life with friends and family. Besides, he is also emphatically explaining the role of libras (Brazilian sign language) in his life as well as in the 36.3 2020 life of most deaf people: What I would like to present to you is about Libras. Libras is not just a language. Libras belongs to the deaf.
He also uses his turn to denounce the lack of connection and disrespect the deaf experiment in their relationship with the hearing. He does that not by simply complaining but by showing his suffering: The deaf are open to the world, although the hearing continue not to give due importance to them, what make us suffer. His life experience clears out for the audience the importance of belonging to a deaf community: The feeling we have is like we could call the other deaf a second family. Besides, he recognizes the effort to interact with the hearing is one sided most of the times since the whole effort to create meaning is mostly done by the deaf: Unfortunately, the exchange is not reciprocal, as hearing people rarely show the same interest in learning Libras. In his presentation, Isaac is able to expose the oppression he lives and the demand he wants the world to fulfi ll: Deaf people are open and not hidden or closed, but the big problem is contempt. Deaf grows in this suffering. I am oppressed and suffer to this day.
Isaac attempted to place himself in the scene, expressing his emotional state and using a range of multimodal means to build his ideas by sharing them with the hearing group in a safe space where he could use art to express who he was, how he felt and what he wanted to demand from the world.
When Isaac fi nished his presentation, before he could recite again, Carla, a researcher and interpreter, asked the group if they wanted to say anything they had understood from Isaac's recitation. Some hearing participants made some suggestions such as "he showed an emotion, a strong emotion", "he said things about learning together", "he talked about exclusion" (said another participant gesturing with her hands in the same way as Isaac had done), "he talked about the cochlear implant", "he sees himself as the lyric 'I'", "It sounded like he had suffered a lot as well", "I felt something very heavy, a tension, as if he was carrying something, and people threw some things at him".
In order to present their ideas, participants had to resort to their life experience and language resources in order to place themselves in the position of grasping possible meanings and empathizing possible interpretations. In parallel and also in contradiction to the situation Isaac was describing, the hearing participants showed their lack of familiarity with sign language. But, simultaneously, they expressed their deep willingness to understand and to make sense of the performance, using their social-cultural itinerary.
After that, Bruna, another deaf participant, complemented the interpretation of Isaac's speech. However, before she spoke, the coordinator explained that Bruna had also been a student participant in some previous years but now she was a graduated teacher who came back to visit and to participate as much as she could. Table 3 and pictures 7 show her emphatic and emotional engagement with Isaac's performance and the audience discussion. These speeches relating their situations to a feeling of depression and repression were in line with the previous and future performances by some hearing presenters who expressed similar feelings based on other types of oppression they suffered. Before Isaac and Bruna, for instance, a black and transgender student and a female student poetically expressed their sorrow for not being accepted by their families and society. After them, others also expressed similar feelings regarding other forms of oppression and all did so in attempts to have their voices heard.
Poetic language and multimodal means created an environment for the construction and use of interrelated discursive practices in order to signify together. The difference between what the deaf participant said and what people understood shows that there was need for more attempts at fi nding means to signify together through more resources.
On the other hand, the resources used by the participants to make sense of what Isaac said show that they cared about understanding him. Besides that, the recognition of the deaf people's diffi culties in life by the hearing connected their sorrows and made voicing all their sorrows possible because they created a safe space for sharing.
The attention of the hearing participants to the deaf participants shows their ways to pool their language knowledge to construct something new with the offerings given by the deaf participants. It is possible to visualize in these episodes how strong emotions connected them all during the big group discussion.
The types of tasks and the forms of interactions created provided a safe space for the de-encapsulation of ideas, contents, roles, perspectives, languages spoken, economic background, among others. In the performatic stances where translanguaging was not only done and expected but suggested a claim for decolonizing relationships was initiated.

Concluding Remarks
This article aimed at discussing how can multiple voices in society be heard, valued and empowered in a culturally diverse and inequitable society. The analyses presented the different ways in which translanguaging enabled participants to join the activities and how, through the hospitable quality of translanguaging, their voices were taken into consideration for the construction of meaning and as an attempt to move beyond their initial status. All participants needed to engage their social and cultural itineraries in order to navigate within the poetic and political space of a soiree. They also had to learn how to place themselves in the social scenes they were visiting. In the session, there were so many diversity and life experiences which some people had never had contact with that each and every one was called to go beyond their immediate possibilities to create the "viable unheard of".
All participants had to access the complexes of indexically ordered and functionally organized resources they had gathered throughout their lives in order to recognize and fi ght for subjects' voices they perhaps had never refl ected upon. Therefore, it was possible to understand that translanguaging practices, in a de-encapsulated perspective, managed to support a decolonized involvement of the different participants in artistic and educational activities promoted by the project.
In this article, the analytical effort to show a project for deencapsulating curriculum allowed the presentation of the revolutionary role of translanguaging for decolonizing interactions and creating the involvement of deaf and hearing participants in the interdisciplinary work with poems and social inequalities. The episodes used exemplify ways to develop forms of resistance which enable the concept of translanguaging as a possibility for the "viable unheard of". That is, when facing limiting and oppressive situations, together, participants may use their multiple resources to create that which has not yet been create but which is doable within the constraints of reality, that which allows for the common and creative to be born.