This chapter provides the reader with a depiction of the methodology involved in conducting the study of Black immigrant youth’s literacies presented in the book. I begin with an overview of who I am, how I am situated in the study, and what I bring to this book as a person and as a Black-immigrant-scholar-single-parent-mother-educator. A discussion of the (decolonizing) interpretive research design is then presented and justified. The context of the study is described, followed by a detailed description of participants and informants (i.e., secondary participants) involved in the study. The protocols for collecting data are discussed. This is followed by the procedures for collecting data from participants. The analytical discussion follows, accompanied by an example of the analytical process used to organize and narrate the data. Credibility, verisimilitude, and transferability are then addressed.

In this chapter, I present a conceptual framework for understanding the perspectives used as lenses to examine the construct of Black immigrant literacies in this book. The chapter begins with a historicizing of multiliteracies and translanguaging followed by a description of the way in which literacy has emerged as a sociocultural and multimodal practice. Raciolinguistics, a raciolinguistic perspective, transracialization, as well as language and raciosemiotic architecture are then presented in tandem, highlighting how linguistic and broader semiotic affordances work based on ideologies steeped in racialized language and semiotics. In turn, raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies influencing multiliteracies of Black immigrant youth are discussed as well as mechanisms such as a transraciolinguistic approach which function as an avenue for understanding how Black immigrants leverage literacies in relation to peers. Following this, translanguaging based on an integrated model of multilingualism is presented along with a description of the ways in which Black immigrants’ language practices have been examined and intersect to undergird the current study regarding the literacies of Black immigrant youth. In doing so, connections across these concepts as well as the potential influence of race-based ideologies for clarifying Black immigrants’ multiliteracies are illuminated through attention to translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes.