Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper studies how transnational children and their distantly located but emotionally close family members recreate their relationship using applications for online video calling. The focus is on the interaction of bodies and language, and if/how proximity of any kind is enabled. A critical posthumanist applied linguistics is embraced and communication is viewed as a bodily coordination ocurring in real time. This includes a material and dynamic view of language in constant transformation. Video captures are produced with three transnational, multilingual families in China and their adult relatives residing abroad (Europe). Moment analysis informs the processing of data. The analysis includes multipart semiotic assemblages of critical/creative moments and applies the Deleuzian concept of sense. The results suggest, the multi-local analogue/digital situation in online calling transcends conventionally imagined spatial ‘boundaries’. Furthermore, a bodily, multisensory proximity emerge as simultaneously critical to and created by this transcending spatiality. Multi-local communicative practices shed light on the multiple, material and semiotic components of the human senses, and how a rational understanding of proximity might be twisted. Proximity constantly emerges ‘in new copies' transcending the far away and close.
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