One of the more interesting classes I took this quarter was an honors class about something called New Literacy Studies. This area of study is focused on the "politics of translation." Instead of looking at translation as a neutral linguistic act, we looked at translation as inherently political and meaningful. We read many sources discussing research in the field and historical/current instances showing the significance of paying attention to all of the forces involved in translations.
The final project was a group project where we created our own research study. For this study, we looked at how a community actively participates in translating or recontextualizing genres and literacies. We were supposed to look at one of our own communities and my group chose K-Pop fans because it was something we all had in common. We looked at how Western fans of K-Pop use Korean words in their speech online in order to strengthen their connections to online communities. While I did a lot of research, I don't feel as though we did enough of the study aspect so it felt a bit incomplete but it was still quite interesting.