For this sixth issue of Ramble, our goal was to take the 2024 issue’s theme of “margins” one step further. With the theme of “Spotlight,” we wish to evoke the artists and creators coming from marginalized communities, former colonies, and the Global South, who currently claim a place in the spotlight of mainstream media and culture.
This edition also reflects the central place of students’ presentations in the 2026 Multilingual Pedagogy Committee’s Spring Symposium. Apart from contributing to the Symposium with wonderful presentations, many students were interested in sharing their work with the Georgia Tech community through Ramble. At the same time, this issue is a valuable showcase of the student work produced in English 1102 and Tech Comm courses, demonstrating our students’ creative engagement with multilingualism and multiculturalism, often through the means of multimodality.
Another key strength of the current issue is its diversity of genres and modalities. Our contributors’ creative writing takes various forms, including academic essays, infographics, reflections on video essays, poems, and family recipes. These different forms and media allow creators to communicate thoughts and feelings that might otherwise resist neat translation through a single language or form. Through a diverse array of written, visual, and auditory “languages”, all contributions explore the theme of “Spotlight” from various angles placing the histories and cultures of places like South Africa or Puerto Rico in dialogue with mainstream media.
–Seungho Lee & Emiliano Gutierrez-Popoca, editors