Echoes of the Steppe, Transnational Dreams: Translanguaging Tongues, Transracial Lives, and the Making of Qazaqness in Los Angeles' Little Kazakhstan

Munira Kairat

As growing numbers of Central Asian families migrate to the United States, form communities, and raise a new generation, Southern California has become home to visible Central Asian communities, including a growing Kazakh community. Yet little is known about how Central Asian children and youth navigate multilingual development, heritage language learnings, and transnational belonging. This dissertation addresses this gap by examining multilingual Kazakh children and youth's heritage language revalorization and identity formation in a community-based heritage language program established by first-generation immigrants from Kazakhstan. The community offers three courses in Kazakh literacy, art-based multiliteracies, and dombra (string instrument), with instructions mobilizing Kazakh, English, and Russian repertoires shaped by Kazakh language revalorization, Russification legacies, and U.S. schooling. This project asks two questions. First, what design moves in intergenerational, culturally grounded, translingual community classes enable learners to develop usable Kazakh while navigating other linguistic repertoires, and how do these moves broaden equitable participation across different community settings? Second, how do moment-to-moment classroom interactions organize moral accountability and belonging, including how race, ethnicity, and nationality are invoked and negotiated? Grounded in a relationality-informed and community-collaborative framework, the study draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, classroom video recordings, multi-party interviews with community members, and digital ethnography of the community's Instagram presence. The study contributes design principles for community-based trilingual instruction, theorizes usable Kazakh as a pedagogical goal that balances inclusion and language revalorization, and shows how postcolonial and post-independence multilingual communities cultivate culture, belonging, and emerging American and transnational Central Asian identities.

About Munira Kairat

Munira Kairat is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara, with a program focus on Culture, Language, and Human Development. She holds an M.A. in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership from the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of educational linguistics, multilingual literacies, Asian American studies, and studies of Central Asia and its transnational populations. As a transnational Central Asian Kazakh scholar, Munira's research is shaped by her long-term engagement with Kazakh and broader Central Asian immigrant communities in the United States. Her work includes studies of family language policy, children's multilingual interactions, community-based heritage language classrooms, social media narratives, and cultural performances as sites where linguistic and cultural identities and belonging are constructed. Grounded in community-based and relational approaches, her scholarship attends to how families, children, educators, and community members sustain less commonly taught languages while navigating post-independence/postcolonial histories, migration, and emerging Asian American contexts. Munira has been a community-engaged educator and researcher for over ten years. She has worked with community-based programs and NGOs across multiple countries to design curricula and teaching materials for multilingual and transnational children. At University of California, Santa Barbara, she has taught and assisted with courses in both the Department of Education and the Department of Asian American Studies. Beyond academic life, Munira is also a digital illustration artist, poetry writer, and community teacher.