This transdisciplinary book reimagines English Language Education (ELE) by exploring how translanguaging and arts-based pedagogies (ABP) can build justice through a critical global citizenship education (GCE) framework. It argues for a critical GCE to disrupt dominant ideologies and open space for liberatory, bottom-up pedagogies in ELE.

Drawing on four studies from secondary and university settings in urban Japan, the book uses feminist poststructuralist theory, ethnography, and arts-based research to examine how integrations of translanguaging and ABP can engage learners in affective, embodied, reflective, and relational dimensions of critical global citizenship. Through a sociopolitical, historicised perspective on ELE in Japan and East Asia, the monograph provides a framework for the strategic design of translanguaging ABP. It emphasizes the importance of negotiating institutional constraints intentionally to embrace translanguaging ABP’s multimodality, and balancing open-endedness with flexible instructional scaffolding for critical impact. The book also explores the national and regional complexities that shape translanguaging ABP’s potentials for fostering critical global citizenship.

The book addresses scholars, educators, and policymakers who seek to go beyond surface-level internationalization in ELE toward approaches rooted in justice, criticality, and connection.

Yaya Yao is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the International Office at the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University, Japan.