Between words and worlds: Navigating historical memory, meaning-making, and transformative possibilities through critical language pedagogies

This thesis examines how historical memory is produced in a multilingual, transnational Spanish and K’iche’ language school in Guatemala. Building on critiques of institutionalised, transitional justice-oriented memory practices, and on growing scholarship exploring pedagogies as potentially transformative means of engaging with violent pasts, this study contributes to a gap in the literature where the potential of transnational language education remains largely under examined. Through an in-depth qualitative case study, the research analyses how memory is engaged and made meaningful, how multilingual and transnational dynamics mediate pedagogical encounters, and what tensions and possibilities emerge shape the distinctive approach of the chosen school. Drawing on one month of participatory research as an enrolled student, the findings show that memory work takes shape through situated, relational and continually negotiated practices in sustained dialogue and interaction with a visually, politically grounded environment. By centring subjectivities shaped by organised resistance and drawing attention to the layered temporalities of violence and struggle, the school unsettles dominant victim-centred memory frames and transforms teaching into an active practice of remembering in the face of state-led efforts to forget. Multilingual and transnational dynamics introduced both constraints and openings for expression, listening and relation, making partiality and collaborative meaning making central to the pedagogical process. Overall, this study demonstrates how critical, multilingual language education can become a meaningful site of everyday memory production and historical-political engagement, opening possibilities for the cultivation of more critical awarenesses and dispositions from which more historically conscious and justice-oriented forms of action may begin to emerge.