This paper explores one student’s - Adam’s - engagement with transglobal flows of information and activity, his growing transglobal awareness of the world, and the consequences of these experiences over a 13-year period. The author maintains that transglobal flows create powerful opportunities for learning that are less available to children raised in mono-national, monocultural, and monolingual spaces. By attending to the emergence, uptake, resonance, scale, and bifocality involved in transglobal negotiations, these data track and invite analysis of transglobal flows of people, texts, and ideas, including the meanings negotiated by Adam across time and space. These longitudinal data speak to the surfacing of Adam’s cosmopolitan view of the world and his ethical commitment to shared humanity (Appiah, 2006). Perhaps most significantly, the study tracks the unfolding of a critical cosmopolitanism (Hawkins, 2014, 2018, 2020) that highlights social action in response to perceived inequities. Adam was one of eight children participating in the larger study of families who emigrated to the northern midwestern United States from China, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, or Nepal. This study posed general ethnographic questions about literacy practices and identity construction for children in immigrant families across time. The families were solicited through a convenience sample recruited by a team of graduate students, and local educators. While we initially recruited sixteen families, some moved away or transferred to schools that declined participation in the project. By the time all the children had entered middle school, eight children/families remained in the project. Joining the study during its first year, a year after he’d emigrated from Morocco, Adam was among the oldest children and has now graduated high school. Adam’s case is an example of what is possible when children are provided with opportunities to learn about and engage in transglobal practices. It reveals important insights into experiences, relationships, and literacies that can support critical cosmopolitanism stances. This paper contributes to a growing body of work (Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014; Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009) that highlights the knowledge, literacies, and understandings that children in transglobal families bring to classrooms. In short, we view immigrant children as engaging in multifaceted and fluid transglobal flows of information and activity that foster transglobal awareness and can lead to critical cosmopolitan stances.

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