Advocating linguistic justice through digital multimodal composing against GenAI biases: a case study of multilingual youths in an EMI university

The importance and challenge of advocating linguistic justice in universities where English is stipulated as the medium of instruction (EMI) are well documented. This study explores how a cohort of multilingual youths advocated linguistic justice by digital multimodal composing of video documentaries on linguistic racism with their lived experiences and GenAI tools. Following a case study design, multiple sources of data were collected, including semi-structured interviews, stimulated recalls, student-authored video documentary, and screen-recordings of the GenAI-assisted composing process. A combination of thematic and multimodal analysis demonstrates three forms of linguistic justice advocacy: challenging hiring bias in ELT professional contexts, representing English varieties in workplace, and exposing implicit linguistic racism. The findings also show that underneath the advocacy was multilingual youths’ agentic multimodal composing across multiple GenAI platforms and against three GenAI biases: reproducing model English teacher stereotypes, hyper-reduction of linguistic diversity into a few dominant forms, and embedded platformised White standard English. We argue that for linguistic justice to be achieved in EMI settings, it is pivotal to support multilingual youths to capitalise on all their communicative repertories to multimodally compose not just with, but also against GenAI.