confluences logo with aerial view of snaking rivers in background

  • screenshot of DMX ASL sign language youtube video
    ‘‘Deafinitely:” The Racialization of Black Communication in the U.S.A. by Eniola Ajao

Our Vision

Confluences occur constantly within the Amherst community. Our campus is a space where different tongues, like rivers, flow, carrying in their currents a burst of experiences, subjectivities, worldviews, and thoughts. This magazine provides a platform to express and share these moments of convergence. It is a repository not only of exchanged ideas but also of ideas merged into one another through the movements of language. It seeks to blur the boundaries between the push of similarities and the pull of differences, catching these rivers as they merge and giving them voice.

Confluences: Lost & Found in Translation is written, edited, and translated by Amherst College students, staff, and faculty—many of whom are bilingual or multilingual. It navigates the complexities—and consequent difficulties—of embodied multilingualism and celebrates all the linguistic, cultural, personal, and communal insights that translation can inspire. Through deep engagement with writing and translation, we reflect on how we sometimes fail to do justice to one another’s linguistic and social realities. We seek, among other things, to decenter English as the normative language of power. We explore—and share with our readers—how encountering linguistic challenges can enliven our understandings of the world.

Editors: Aqiil Gopee ’20 and Hapshiba Kwon ’20.


If you are interested in writing for Confluences: Lost & Found in Translation, in translating any published articles or future ones, or in being involved in some other way, please email confluences@amherst.edu.