Translanguaging: Process and power in education

•Critiques of translanguaging focus on deconstructivism and transformative limitations.•Translanguaging can productively combine ideas from Bakhtin and Bourdieu and move beyond structuralist debates.•A process-based critical view of language opens up useful lines of inquiry in education.•Transformative potential relates to people rather than to language. In this article we develop translanguaging as a theoretical perspective in education by drawing together ideas of process and symbolic power. We first outline critiques of translanguaging, most particularly the issue of deconstructivism and concerns about transformative limitations. We then focus on the potential of translanguaging as a conceptual frame for how language mediates learning in the context of social inequity (schools). We primarily draw on Bakhtin's (1981) theorisation of language and Bourdieu's (1991) understanding of the relationship between language and symbolic power to suggest that taking sociohistorical context as central to translanguaging can help us to move beyond ‘internal’ structuralist debates and open up productive lines of inquiry at the intersection of language and learning.