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The text explores affect as it unfolded for Master students, co-authoring this article, while engaging with personally meaningful objects, making their first animation movie, and reflecting on this process in the light of new materialist theories. The text is an experiment, emerging from a collective process of living animation making, and intensely discussing, co-thinking and co-writing about this experience. The text attempts to make tangible this complex process, and it aims to share with the reader the potential of animation making as a source of affect, emerging from a temporary assemblage of people and things joint in co-creation and co-agentive collaboration, driven by affective intensities. It aims, furthermore, to recommend animation making as a powerful tool to put in motion learners and learning about materiality, time, space, and our connections with things and people, spurred by affect as a driving force that pushes us towards discovery. The text ultimately seeks to propose an approach towards learning and understanding literacy that takes impetus and grounding from the forces of living, open to the unforeseen and unpredictable, and based in processes of immanence, emergence and movement, rather than in stasis and pre-meditated design.

This chapter explores language in global South-North migration from the perspective of aspiring migrants in Lusophone West Africa within the context of increasingly restrictive European immigration regimes and their consequence of involuntary immobility in the South. While sociolinguistic scholarship has successfully engaged with globalization, mobility, and movement of people, it has insufficiently engaged with that which and those who don’t travel well. We argue that a sociolinguistics of globalization needs to develop multi-sited methods and tools for investigating and understanding these absent presences – the invisibly excluded – and propose that repertoires and trajectories are useful tools in such undertaking. The paper attempts a theoretical review of these concepts and illustrates their analytical potential with three cases from ongoing fieldwork in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau as part of a larger ethnographic project at the University of Luxembourg that explores the language lives, learning histories, (unfinished) travels, further mobile aspirations and changing social status of young West Africans on the move. The paper concludes by arguing that South-North mobilities are shaped by as well as shaping multilingual repertoires, and are entangled in complex desires and strategies of mobility.