Investing Across Online and Offline Spaces and the Negotiation of Embodied and Imagined Identities

Abstract

The articles gathered in this special issue vividly demonstrate how the model of investment has been mobilized to interrogate both online and offline spaces, and how the act of investing in discursive practices is always contextualized, situated, and contingent. Whether learners configure their engagement amidst AI-mediated “digital wilds,” in bilingual preschool classrooms, elite universities, or constrained sociopolitical landscapes, investment emerges as a dynamic, emergent process negotiated through shifting relations of power. In online arenas, Liao and colleagues (this issue) show how AI-mediated informal digital learning of English (IDLE) practices foster autonomy and the right to speak (Norton, 1995) for learners who strategically mobilize digital tools beyond classrooms, while foregrounding macro-level policy frameworks such as the expansion of EMI that shape those practices. Investigating the context of Afghanistan, Rabbidge and Zaheeb (this issue) trace how social networks and platforms become alternative pathways for acquiring and translating symbolic capital under conditions of ideological policing and infrastructural precarity, yet with an always contingent legitimacy that shifts with political narratives.

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