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This special issue has been a journey, founded in an acknowledgement shared by many within multiple disciplines that the notion of ‘trans-’ has been gaining momentum and visibility within an increasingly globalized world. Terms abound: transnational, transcultural, translocal, transpatial, transmodal, translanguaging, and translingual, to name just a few that bear on global and local communications, understandings, and interactions. ‘Trans-’ can be understood to mean crossing borders or boundaries, and this move toward a ‘trans-’ disposition signals the need to transcend the named and bounded categories that have historically shaped our thinking about the world and its inhabitants, the nature of knowledge, and communicative resources. Thus, from a ‘trans-’ perspective, we must consider movement across nations and cultures, spaces and places, modes and semiotic resources, and autonomous named languages. Yet if we destabilize discrete labels and categories, how do we understand human communications and interactions? In fact, these terms with the ‘trans-’ prefix at once advocate for the appreciation of fluidity and flexibility seen in contemporary society and underscore the very existence of categories, borders, and boundaries that are called into question. How should we grapple with this tension between innovations and traditions, and account for spatial and temporal relationships that shape our communicative acts? In what ways does the notion of ‘trans-’ advance our research and educational endeavors, or present challenges? How does it relate to or differ from other terms that have been introduced to describe seemingly similar phenomena? How does it align with, diverge from, and/or complicate theoretical and applied domains in our field? These questions were the impetus for this journey.
