Stornaiuolo, AmyMonea, Bethany2023-11-222023-11-2220232023https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/590652023This dissertation is motivated by the limits of current conceptualizations of college transition—the metaphorical bridges, pathways, and tracks to college that represent a linear trajectory upheld by normative educational progress narratives often oriented toward Eurocentric, English-dominant, text-based standards for academic writing and research. Guided by Latina Feminist theories, I offer a reconceptualization of college transition as a dynamic, expansive, and liminal borderland space by tracing the composing practices of eight first-generation (first-gen), Latinx students whose living and learning in boundary-crossing spaces position them as epistemically privileged guides for such an inquiry. In this study, I asked: How did a group of first-gen, Latinx students navigate and research the transition from high school to college? To investigate this question, I conducted 18 months of ethnographic and participatory research while facilitating participants’ production of YouTube videos about their college transition experiences. Through qualitative and collaborative analysis, I identified ways that participants engaged in writing, art, and media-making practices to negotiate, resist, and transform the limiting, narrow standards of “academic” writing and research on the “college track.” More specifically, I explored how participants engaged in composing at the nexus of high school and college to assert their bilingual, bicultural identities through multiliteracies; to navigate unexpected pathways to college through autobiographical writing; and to expand the boundaries of academic writing and research through participatory methodologies. I conclude by suggesting how participatory research and students’ nepantla literacies (Lizárraga & Gutiérrez, 2018) can expand and transform the borders that currently constrain academic knowledge production—and, by extension, "college-level" writing and "college-track" curriculum—by centering the literacies, epistemologies, and identities historically relegated to the margins.enEducationHigher EducationEducationCollege TransitionCompositionFirst-GenerationLatinxParticipatory ResearchWriting StudiesDissertation/Thesis2023-11-22