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Bonnie Urciuoli on her book, Neoliberalizing Diversity in Liberal Arts College Life

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Interview by Ilana Gershon

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/UrciuoliNeoliberalizing#:~:text=Bonnie%20Urciuoli%20is%20Professor%20Emerita,diversity%20in%20U.S.%20higher%20education.

Ilana Gershon: What was the moment that you realized that you had to write a book on what role diversity is now supposed to play in liberal arts education? 

Bonnie Urciuoli: It was some years after I started the actual research which itself started by accident. In the early 1990s, I had begun my teaching career at a small, expensive, and quite white liberal arts college while finishing my first book (Exposing Prejudice) about New York Puerto Rican experiences of race, class, and language. I had several students who could have been from the families and neighborhoods of the people I worked with for that book, and we talked sometimes about their take on life at the college. Then I heard about a faculty member telling incoming bilingual students in their summer course for the Higher Education Opportunity Program that their writing was poor because they thought in Spanish. As I got to know these students, we started talking about being judged in racialized ways. These conversations led to interviews about coming to the college as Puerto Rican from the Bronx or Dominican from the Heights and then being reclassified – and learning to imagine oneself – as multicultural (diverse was not yet a widespread term) and as Hispanic or Latino/a (Latinx not yet a term at all). My first attempts to write this up were unsatisfying. Then I realized that while multicultural affairs administrators (in the student life office) tried to recognize and address issues faced by students of color, the offices of institutional advancement and admissions saw students of color as a resource for promoting the college and recruiting white students. This was the late 1990s, when the college branding and marketing industry was taking off. In conversations with my dear late colleague Henry Rutz, conversations that became for me an extended informal tutorial on the commodification of higher education, I came to see how notions of “diversity” had come to index market positioning for the promotion of liberal arts education. That’s probably when I understood that the core issue of the book, which I framed using Michael Silverstein’s semiotic approach, would be how elite liberal arts institutions work images of and stories about student ‘diversity’ into their marketing, part of a larger process targeting prospective students, parents, and donors who are overwhelmingly white.

IG: I am struck how much this neoliberal notion of diversity heavily depends on a particular understanding of race as the ur-example. How does it happen that race seems to be the template shaping what diversity becomes in the hands of higher education institutions?

BU: What I call neoliberal diversity derives from an understanding of race as an inherent characteristic of person that can be counted and visualized. It builds on and departs from older notions of race. Race, as the construction evolved over centuries of chattel slavery and colonizers’ appropriation of inhabitants’ land, resources, and labor, was construed as natural, inherited, hierarchic, and physically manifest. Race in the U.S. has been bureaucratized since 1790 as countable census units. It is now most widely counted using some form of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB or ‘affirmative action’) categories Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American, White. In the 1980s, the general term for non-white in undergraduate student life (and curricula) was multicultural(ism), emphasizing positive elements of identity and history. The neoliberal angle, promoted in the 1990s by diversity trainers to obscure associations with group identity and social justice, replaced use of affirmative action and multiculturalism with diversity, signifying valued resources brought to work by individual workers and obscuring historically embedded hierarchy. As neoliberal notions of diversity moved from the corporate world into higher education, they were taken up by offices of admission and college marketers playing to prospective white students, parents, and trustees with the message that diversity, in the form of students of color, added value to (white) students’ education. College marketers may talk about “all kinds of diversity” but they need students who look like they fit those OMB categories to count and show pictures of and tell inspiring stories about on the website.

Ilana Gershon: What would you want students of color at other colleges to know about how higher education structures diversity?

Bonnie Urciuoli: As will be news to no one, the primary social function of higher education, what it actually does, is not particularly student centered. So it will also be no surprise that higher education institutions use diversity in ways that benefit their own interests (as Sara Ahmed points out in On Being Included), just as they use any term or notion (community, changemaking, find your passion – to pick a few at random from college websites) meant to shape how they are perceived. Actual education and student welfare do not top this list. Given the market ordering of higher education (like any institution and organization) under conditions of contemporary capitalism, the primary function of terms favored by marketers is going to be promotional. But linguistic/semantic ideologies direct people to expect words to have ‘real’ (fixed, universal) meaning. One hears institutional talk about valuing diversity, and one might legitimately take value and diversity at (what one assumes to be) face value. I’d like all students anywhere to understand that point. I’d particularly like students of color anywhere to be suspicious as hell about the motives of higher education administrators, marketers, or for that matter faculty who forward institutional interests or their own interests through rhetoric that plays on student identities: they are unlikely to have students’ best interests at heart.

Ilana Gershon: Why do fraternities keep holding parties with questionable themes? What is it about whiteness in the context of this neoliberal institution with its particular version of diversity that fraternities are in relationship to in these parties?

Bonnie Urciuoli: The ‘Ethnic Night’ theme party (a racialized ethnicity) that I wrote about in chapter 5 got immediate stiff blowback and, as far as I know, it was the last one that fraternity gave. Why did they give it in the first place? Since I didn’t interview the members involved, I can only go by what I heard: they had given this theme party for years, they served food and drink and played music identified with that ethnic group, and attendees dressed as members of that ethnic group. (So far as I know, this did not involve blackface, which involves dynamics beyond what I cover here.) The question remains, when students do throw such parties, why don’t they think about the racialized ethnic stereotype in relation to whiteness? My answer, condensed from that chapter, is that most students at privileged schools, especially those who are socially unmarked (what the group involved regards as a typical or modal social identity, here middle-class white), are likely to see the sphere of the social as the sphere of fun (as Chaise LaDousa has masterfully analyzed in House Signs and Collegiate Fun). Fraternity life provides that sphere as autonomous and separate from ‘official’ college control, enhanced by alcohol and enacted through transgressive play. Unmarked people, students or not, are also likely to see racial issues in terms of personal intent (certainly not structure), and if no one ‘intended’ harm then no harm was done; hence participants disassociate theme parties from racism. They also dissociate them from any notion of diversity associated with school policy which has no place in the world of student fun.

            The chapter also looks at a Bros and Hoes party given by a different fraternity. The Ethnic Night party generated a strong sense of moral outrage among faculty and students; the Bros and Hoes party provoked some but much less reaction. The difference, I suspect, lies in the dynamics of play with racial markedness versus with gender markedness. In Ethnic Night (and other race/ethnic themed) parties, unmarked students play at being marked. In Bros and Hoes parties, Hoes, marked relative to Bros, are performed by actual women exaggerating (often transgressively) the terms of that markedness. Women are thus participants (perhaps even party planners), whereas race/ethnic themed parties do not (usually) include marked participants playing stereotyped versions of themselves.  One is tempted to see all this in terms of student morality, but it makes more analytic sense to consider what is indexed by the difference in markedness dynamics. White and non-white students are disconnected in ways that male and female students are not. The ‘fun’ stance grows from a secure social milieu in which people can choose who they want to be with, women along with men, though the footing is not altogether equal.  Being an insider ‘playing’ with notions of race, class, ethnicity, or sex means not taking it seriously or as subject to critique. The critical stance grows from taking an outside perspective. 

IG: What work do workshops do as the go-to genre for how institutions choose to address diversity in higher education?

BU: What I can talk about here are the diversity hiring workshops that the Dean of Faculty office required chairs of departments hiring new faculty to attend. Such workshops keep attention firmly disconnected from anything resembling actual history or group formation. They reinforce administrative authority and notions of diversity as beneficial to the institution. Institutions prefer to hire workshops from agencies that their peer institutions use (as agency websites make clear) rather than treat their own faculty as a source of expertise. A workshop’s success (again, as their websites tell you) is measured by outcome, for example, how many diversity hires the school makes after the workshop is given. Workshop messaging to faculty emphasizes how diversity hires enrich their departments, provide role models for students of color, and enhance institutional ‘excellence’: therefore, faculty must proceed with hires as directed by the workshop. The neoliberal message cannot be missed: diversity provides added value, and the more you hire, the more value you add. As to conditions and problems likely to be faced by faculty of color, or how their careers might be affected by the institution or the department – none of that comes up. Workshops also use double addressivity: their overt addressees are faculty; their covert addressees are administrators. They tell faculty what to do and they tell administrators that they recognize that the real problem is faculty who don’t know what to do; in other words, they are helping administrators discipline problem faculty. Above all, such workshops and the experts who run them base their expertise on not bringing historical/structural inequality into play in any systematic way. Their expertise is based on being able to solve problems by fixing what individuals (those problem faculty) do, not by addressing the ways in which inequalities are part of the institution. They are certainly not going to challenge the ways that institutions benefit from the same neoliberalized notions and practices that sustain their market position (and keep the workshop agencies in business).

Andrea Leone-Pizzighella on her book Discourses of Student Success

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Interview by Clara Miller-Broomfield

https://www.routledge.com/Discourses-of-Student-Success-Language-Class-and-Social-Personae-in-Italian/Leone-Pizzighella/p/book/9780367681111

Clara Miller-Broomfield: What led you to choose Cittadina, Umbria as the setting for your fieldwork on discourses of student success in Italian secondary schools?

Andrea Leone-Pizzighella: I chose Cittadina for a few different reasons. First and foremost, I had already established contacts there through a teacher network I was part of several years prior, and I had also done a very brief exploratory study in the schools of Cittadina (focused on the use of dialect in the classroom). Those two elements made my entry much easier than if I had needed to cold-call schools and drum up interested participants. In my experience, no matter where in the world you go as a researcher, it takes an immense amount of time, finesse, and—maybe more than anything else—luck to gain access to a school community (not to mention to three schools, as was the case with my research). I wanted to enter the schools as a researcher and not “sneak in” under the guise of English teacher, which would have undoubtedly eased my entry into the schools, but I would have also then taken on a role that isn’t conducive to the type of research I wanted to do.

Another reason for choosing Cittadina was for its manageable size and affordable cost of living. I left my husband, dog, house, and car in the U.S. while I was doing this research, and was still paying for life in the U.S. while I was doing fieldwork, so I couldn’t afford to spend tons of extra money or excessive time gathering data. I needed to be able to reach the research sites on foot, not be at the mercy of public transportation, and I needed to manage my time well in order to stay on track with my timeline, which was a single academic year. Organizationally, the small (but not too small) size of the city meant that it offered all school options (lyceum, technical, and vocational), but in a contained format, which was perfect. All of the technical subjects were housed in one building, all of the classical subjects in another, and all vocational subjects in another. A smaller city would not have offered all types of secondary school, and a larger city might have had five schools just for the technical subjects, another five for the classical subjects, and so on, which would have made it a nightmare to organize fieldwork. The size of Cittadina and the relatively central location of all the schools made it so that I wasn’t spending half of my day commuting to and from the sites, that I could track people down for interviews with relative ease, and that I had time, energy, and space for working through my data in the evenings.

The third reason I chose Cittadina was because the regional variety spoken there belongs to the family of varieties that is, for me, easiest to understand. I by no means consider myself a speaker of Cittadinese but I was able to understand much of it in a passive sense after a few weeks of exposure to it; Central Italian varieties often resemble Standard Italian enough that it’s not too complicated to identify patterns quickly. (I once heard Guadalupe Valdes refer to this phenomenon of mutual intelligibility as “a one- or two-day language,” which she herself experienced – if I remember correctly— as a Spanish speaker in Venice, where she noticed that there was quite a bit of lexical overlap between Venetian and Spanish.) I also had contacts in a few other cities, but some of these cities were either too big or too expensive to manage for a lone researcher on a PhD stipend, and some cities have a regional variety is not as mutually intelligible (for me, at least) with the variety of Italian that I speak. Cittadina ended up working out really well!

Clara Miller-Broomfield: You mention that the tripartite division of secondary education in Italy creates an inherently unequal system, despite the government’s best intentions to the contrary. How do you think your findings might have differed if you had carried out this research in the United States, where such a rigid division of secondary education does not exist?

Andrea Leone-Pizzighella: As an American student/teacher/researcher in Italy, I have been pondering the pros and cons of the U.S. system and the Italian system for about a decade and I still don’t have a clear-cut statement to provide about my point of view on their differences. Honestly, even though there isn’t often a rigid or physical division (such as a wall) between high school interest groups and student types in the United States, we’re fooling ourselves if we think that students aren’t divided at all – of course they are. We know that the (pseudo)gerrymandering of school districts and their associated very unequal funding sources (especially property taxes) mean that schools in neighboring districts may have vastly different resources and vastly different student bodies. This leads to the same outcome as we see in Italy of some schools being labeled good and others bad. Even looking at a single school in a given neighborhood in the U.S., there are school-internal divisions amongst the students because of streamed or tracked education. This division of students by ability level is the norm in the U.S., and I think some of the effects of this system are very similar to the effects of the Italian system (for example, labeling students as gifted or remedial). What I think is potentially positive however, about the U.S. system of having all of the students from a given area in the same school, is that they can be in the math class labelled gifted but in the writing class labelled remedial, and they can also experiment with lots of different elective subjects as well (IT, art, music, woodshop, psychology, ceramic, Latin, and so on). They don’t need to decide that they are a certain type in terms of their disciplinary interests until their final year of high school, and even then, there is still some wiggle room. There are exceptions, though, especially in large cities, which sometimes follow a model that resembles Italy a bit more (for example, the performing arts high school, the science high school, the Latin school, and so on). I am of course biased, but I tend to think that the focus on general education and the ability to take lots of electives is a very positive aspect of the U.S. school system.

However, to answer your question, I think that I might have found many similarities, but some important differences. One of those differences would have likely been the timeline of student identity formation. Few U.S. students need to decide in middle school what type of career they would like to pursue, unless they are headed toward a trade school. The types of divisions in Italian schools that are already apparent in the first year of upper secondary school might not appear until much later in U.S. high schools (for those following the general education model). Whether this is positive, negative, or neutral, I’m not sure, but I have the feeling that that aspect would have been much different in a U.S.-based study. The other difference I would have expected to see is in regard to the student-student and the student-teacher dynamic. Students in the U.S. often go to many different classrooms a day, and they sometimes have different classmates from one lesson to the next. This means that there is no class unit, as there is in Italian secondary schools where 20-25 students are in a classroom together all day, every day, for every subject, for five years. On the one hand, milling around to all of these different classrooms every day gives a U.S. student perhaps more options and flexibility in terms of self-presentation and identity work, whereas Italian students’ identities might solidify more quickly and stay that way for years. On the other hand, the U.S. model might leave more room for isolation and competition than the Italian model which appeared to favor cooperation and groupness, but there are positive and negative aspects to both sides of the coin here as well.

Clara Miller-Broomfield: I was struck by the fact that many of the specializations offered by vocational schools and technical institutes are associated by outsiders with a positive, even prestigious image of Italy (for example, fashion systems; tourism; food, wine and hospitality; the ‘Made in Italy’ label). During your fieldwork, with the 3Moda class in particular, did you notice an awareness from students and/or teachers of this fact despite the generally negative perception of these schools in popular discourse?

Andrea Leone-Pizzighella: The teachers are definitely aware of what it means to be in the world of fashion, since all of the discipline-specific subject teachers had spent at least a few years trying to make it in that world themselves. I think that nearly all of them (in the specific case of the 3Moda’s fashion teachers) turned to teaching when they had children because the world of fashion was either too competitive or too unstable for raising a family. In their role as teachers, they did whatever they could to leverage their professional networks for educational purposes (finding internship placements for the students, inviting guests who led workshops for the students at school, and sharing anecdotes from what they considered real life fashion work). The 3Moda students were probably less aware of what it meant to choose a career in this industry, but I noticed that some of the students came back transformed and humbled after their two-week internships where they were actually put to work on the floor of a shop (measuring, cutting, sewing), and seeing that it’s really important to get right all of the supposed minutia from class. I think that for a potentially myopic 16-year old, this has a big impact on their approach to their studies and their ability to imagine themselves as part of the fashion system, but reality inevitably hit them after graduation when the time came to market their skills and look for jobs. Not all of them graduated and not all of them have managed to break into the fashion industry.

Just as a side note, I think that the worlds of wine, tourism, and fashion are often romanticized by outsiders because their finished products are usually luxury goods, especially when marketed to non-Italians. What I think is important to highlight, though, is that the vocational school graduates are often on the shop floor in these industries and are not often customer-facing or in a managerial role. They can of course be in these roles, but this requires extra skill development on their part; I wouldn’t say that the vocational school equips them with these skills necessarily. Anthony Bourdain’s famous New Yorker article about Les Halles in New York City comes to mind: behind the elegance and glamour of one of the top-rated restaurants in one of the world’s major culinary cities lies a whole world of blue collar specializations like fry cook, butcher, porter, dishwasher. The reward for doing these jobs flawlessly is often simply… not getting fired. A lot of that type of work is thankless and disconnected from the finished product. The worlds of fashion, wine, and tourism are the same: the people who are doing the dirty and dangerous jobs like operating heavy machinery (for example, fabric presses, tractors, buses) are not the first who come to mind when we think of these industries, but they are an integral part of them despite not being able to afford to indulge in the finished products that they, themselves, are helping to create. For instance, one former student from the 3Moda works for a fashion house whose least expensive scarf is listed at 530 euros: what she earns in about half a month of work.

Clara Miller-Broomfield: You point out that the questione della lingua or “language issue” looms large in everyday discourse in Italy, and that the country’s many regional varieties or dialects are associated with technical and vocational schooling while Standard Italian is associated with the more prestigious lyceum. Do you believe that this perception could be altered by teaching these regional varieties in schools, as is done to some extent in other European countries (such as France and Spain)?

Andrea Leone-Pizzighella: This is a great question, and one that is very hard to answer. While I do indeed say this in the book (about dialect being more associated with vocational/technical students than with lyceum students), I think I should clarify here that this observation is based on my own experiences. I am sure that there are many parts of Italy where this is not the case at all, but in the three parts of Italy where I have spent the most time (Rome, Cittadina, and Verona), I have both observed this phenomenon firsthand and heard about it from contacts and friends in those areas. Every province, region, city, and neighborhood have their own very specific histories, politics, and associated language ideologies, so I can’t make sweeping claims about any realities outside of the ones I have experienced myself. Of course, many countries have undertaken very intensive language revitalization and revalorization efforts and have been, by many measures, extremely successful. However, the reasons why Galician or Catalan are taught in Spain, or why Occitan or Alsatian are taught in France, are rooted in different histories and are motivated by different causes. A few years ago, Sabina Perrino and I put together a special issue for Multilingua that lays out some of the issues with language revitalization efforts in Italy and in Europe more broadly; a lot of the work in that publication speaks directly to this issue and will paint a clearer picture of European language politics for anyone interested in this topic.

However, I’ll go out on a limb and say that teaching regional varieties in schools in Italy would probably not alter their overall standing because it would require them to be so standardized and sterilized that the end product deemed teachable enough for school would probably resemble only somewhat the way that people actually speak. A standardized orthography would need to be decided, as well as a shared pan-regional lexicon and a pan-regional pronunciation. In some regions this might be more straightforward than others, but this presents major problems for many regional varieties because so many city-specific lexical or phonological particularities would need to be erased in order to standardize the dialect on a broad enough scale that it would gain recognition as a supposedly real language. This is all a gross oversimplication, but let’s just say that I am very skeptical as to whether this would help to legitimize the ways that people actually use dialect in schools! It would essentially require inventing a new version of the regional language which, if adopted by institutions like schools, would simply risk alienating speakers of dialect considered untrained and erasing hyperlocal varieties in favor of the invented school-approved one. That said, I think teachers should nonetheless encourage students to leverage any and all of the languages they know in order to facilitate their learning, and that all languages should be treated as resources rather than as hurdles to overcome. This can, of course, be done by a single teacher without the accompaniment of a major language revalorization effort.

Clara Miller-Broomfield: As a linguistic ethnography of education, this book does an excellent job of bridging the gaps between linguistics, education studies and anthropology. If you had to explain the importance of this work to a linguist or discourse analyst without much background in anthropology, what would you say?

Andrea Leone-Pizzighella: Thank you! I think that the linguistic elements and the anthropological elements in this book really lean on and rely on each other for meaning making, but that’s not to say that you need to be an anthropologist in order to understand its significance. In fact, I think the book’s interdisciplinary framework makes it accessible to many students and scholars who work within and across any of the many fields related to education studies, education policy, cultural/linguistic anthropology, (socio)linguistics, and language policy—at least I hope it does! Applied linguists who study what I call “big L” languages in the book might be interested in the discourse that surrounds the teaching and use of these big-L languages in schools, as well as what draws people to pursue particular educational paths. Discourse analysts will likewise hopefully appreciate the book’s look at the many styles and layers of talk in the three different classrooms, whether they are interested in class stratification, didactics, youth language, or how broad societal values filter into conversations between students. There is plenty of small-D discourse and plenty of big-D Discourses (in James Gee’s sense) to analyze in this book, many of which I only hint at. In sum, I would tell anyone generally interested in linguistics, sociolinguistics, or other related fields that this book uses language as its lens in that it looks at ideologies about personhood through the lens of broadly circulating discourses, focusing on the role that words and speech play in constructing, maintaining, and undoing our social worlds.

Leya Mathew discusses her book, English Linguistic Imperialism from Below

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https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/English-Linguistic-Imperialism-from-Below/?k=9781788929134

Interview by Shivani Nag

Shivani Nag: It would be helpful if you could first introduce the book, what led you to this book?

Leya Mathew: This was my dissertation research, at that time, there was a lot of debate about low fee private schools in India. That debate was already happening. And I am from Kerala (South India) where there was a very heated debate about state-funded schools closing down because of private schools. But the academic debate somehow did not match what I was seeing around me. A lot of it was framed in the language of school choice. The school choice literature comes from a very particular historical context in the UK and the US, where school choice makes sense. But in India, school choice makes very little sense. I mean there is this whole body of very insightful literature, but it is misaligned with what is happening. That is what led to the research.

Shivani Nag: The book engages with aspirations for English and among parents. Like you said, your work is based in Kerala, and in the North (of India) certain stereotypes exist about English being a far more comfortable language for those who are from the South. There is a certain complexity of location in the book in terms of geography, you know the dynamics of class, caste, religion (Christianity), the nature of market, and the political leadership (Communist Party). How did you listen to and make sense of the voices emerging in your field, especially because there were also multiple things shaping these voices? Also, I found your choice of “moral aspiration” very interesting, could you share some light on that as well?

Leya Mathew You’re absolutely right, what poverty looks like in certain parts of northern India in comparison to some parts of South India can be very different. Kerala has a long history of development, it’s very contested. At the same time, the intensity of aspiration is noted by others about northern India as well. Aspiration does travel across geography but the specificity of how it manifests would of course be different.

As for moral aspiration, for the longest time the title of my book was Moral Aspiration. The current title came much, much later, after the peer review. While writing, I read Andrea Muehlebach’s The Moral Neoliberal. She’s writing about a very different context, it’s about volunteerism in Italy, but the argument she made was very striking. We assume neoliberal capitalism and its accumulative impetus to be divorced from the moral. But the moral is very central to how capitalism functions as well as to how people are making sense of what’s happening around them.

In my context, whether it was mothers or policymakers in Delhi or Kerala, their expression was very, very moral. So how do you write about a moral neoliberal with all of its contradictions? Because here, you have elites and non-elites using the moral but in very different ways and with very different effects.

When elites claim that they represent the nation, they do so on the strength of their moral claims. Those who study the middle classes have written extensively about the significance of the moral for middle class hegemonic projects. The privileged middle class comes to stand in for everybody else and their agendas come to stand in for national agendas on the basis of their moral claims. The moral becomes the basis of how resources are distributed. Those are the two aspects I was trying to emphasize with the phrase moral aspiration.

Shivani Nag: I also wanted to ask you about the debate on medium of instruction, which has often and rightfully so, connected to questions around access, the accessibility of knowledge for the marginalized and for the oppressed sections. If you look at the Thorat committee report that came out after allegations of caste-based discrimination of students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), one of the key concerns and recommendations had to do with the language gap, non-familiarity with English and the fact that institutions were doing very little to bridge that gap. When it comes to English, different kinds of voices have emerged from within the anti-caste struggles.  There are those who see in English an opportunity to counter a certain form of caste-ist standardization in regional languages. Both English and the regional language can be alienating and disconnected from the context. And, of course, others have also pointed towards the epistemological functions of language, and thus the need for the language of the oppressed to be brought to classrooms. Given these debates, I was wondering how would you reflect on the question of language and access, especially for the oppressed castes?

Leya Mathew My current project is on higher education, so these are things that I have been thinking about. In hyper competitive spaces like the IITs and AIIMS, questions around language can function very differently. In mid or lower tier spaces, English can work very differently. There’s something about how the space is located in relation to larger structures, we need to pay attention to that. The schools that I’m looking at in the book are really on the margins of society. As for epistemology, one of the things that I struggled with a lot is, what does epistemology mean when you can access the language only in its written form? These were also personal questions. I studied in a village and then a small town growing up, and I could only write in English. I learned to speak in English a lot later, after I went to college in the city. If you take all of this into consideration, then what are the kind of pedagogic and linguistic spaces that can be negotiated and created?  Can we creates ones which are not just welcoming but which are also serious because there’s also a lot of desperate desire for learning?

Shivani Nag: I was also thinking about bell hooks in the context of race. When she talks about English, there is the sense of this being the oppressor’s language which is still needed by the oppressed to be able to talk to those in power. When it comes to languages in India, given the very complex linguistic context we have, it’s not easy for us to clearly identify which is the oppressor’s language. In the context of caste, it’s a particular form of standardized regional language which becomes the oppressor’s language. Then the colonizer’s language can, instead, become a liberating language; our context is very complex.

Leya Mathew: It gets slightly more complicated in Kerala, because the state, the Communist Party is saying exactly this. In the book I write about how the state says that we don’t want a prettified language, we want to intentionally bring the language of the oppressed into our textbooks, and they did that to some extent. But the way it functioned; it became a very perverse inclusion of the language of the oppressed.

Shivani Nag: The private-public divide in schools almost neatly translates to the English versus regional language, and the elite – non-elite private school divide to one between those students who are coming from contexts where English is almost their first language versus those for whom English would still be an imposition. Can the question of language in school can be split off from the concern for the common school system, given that our schools are so hierarchical, and divided so sharply?

Leya Mathew: Yes, it is an extremely hierarchical system. How to work with language education within this hierarchical system if you do not have the option of common schooling is something that needs to be engaged with seriously. I think the debate misses that point, you’re very right. Common schooling has been talked about from the very beginning (independence of the nation), but never been implemented. By now, we know that it will never happen. Any discussion on language education or, for that matter, anything to do with pedagogy has to take this into account. When we have this sort of hierarchical system, then what does it mean to make textbooks for the country? Or design instruction for our country? It doesn’t work. I’m sure that even within a common schooling system there would be hierarchies. But what we have are very institutionalized hierarchies which also distribute resources in very particular ways. You’re absolutely right, I think there needs to be a lot more discussion on this.

Shivani Nag: Since you brought in the question of pedagogy, there is also an imagination of the nation in textbooks. Another school ethnography around aspirations for English that I found engaging was by Shalini Advani and that book, Schooling the National Imagination, was located in the North Indian context. Given the concerns around language imposition that have again come up with the National Education Policy and the resistance from the southern states, how did the relation between language aspiration and a national identity unfold in your field?

Leya Mathew There’s a lot in Shalini’s book about how the nation is imagined, particularly through textbooks, but she also talks about how the classrooms themselves didn’t fit into that imagination because they were on the margins of society. I don’t talk about nationalism in the book but where it comes through most clearly is in the CBSC high school textbooks, the Main Course Book, where immediately, this techno-science nation emerges.

The other reason why I could not really think about nationalism in the context of my study is perhaps because the nation is implicitly Hindu, and Hindi-speaking these days. Sanjay Srivastava demonstrated some of it brilliantly in his book about the Doon School. My context was neither Hindu nor Hindi speaking. Your question makes me reflect on why nationalism did not come up as a theme for me.

There is obviously more sub-nationalism than nationalism in terms of language identities if you look at South India. For the Kerala State and for regional elites, and remember these are people who are bilingual and very comfortable with academic Malayalam and academic English, there is definitely a feeling of imposition (of Hindi), as well as mechanisms of responding and resisting. But these concerns are very distant for those who are not imagined as part of the nation to begin with.

Shivani Nag: When one tries to engage with questions around aspirations, looking at them not just in (marginalized) communities, but also in leadership, that is important.

Moving forward, I was also thinking about how the medium of instruction question in schools cannot be insulated from the question of medium of instruction in higher education. You know language diversity in school systems does not carry over to higher education. In India, higher education is even more exclusive, I think we can confidently say that at least 90% of it is in English.

Leya Mathew: And the sciences, engineering, medicine, architecture, all of that is only taught in English. Like I said, I’m studying higher education now and in a state (Gujarat) where regional-medium education is very strong. I see it unfolding in a much more complex way. These are high achievers from Gujarati-medium schools, they’ve made it to a premier college at the regional level. So those from regional language instruction may have other resources that they can mobilize. Another important factor to keep in mind is that this is also a time of increasing unemployment, when even a professional degree does not lead you to a decent job. What does the cultural capital of English mean if it just leads to a precarious labor market, so it’s complicated.

Shivani Nag: The whole idea of language and socioeconomic mobility must be getting affected in so many ways, with the decline in employment opportunities.

What were some of the major insights that emerged from your field research that perhaps also took you by some surprise? There are certain expectations that one has, I’m very interested in knowing what the surprises were.

Leya Mathew Fieldwork always surprises you. Even in my current project, I went in thinking that those from English medium schools would have everything lined up for them, and it was a big surprise to learn that English did not get you anywhere. In terms of the book, I think the most surprising part was, I thought if you were deprived and knew you were deprived, you would respond with anger. It seems very naïve now. At the Malayalam-medium school, there was a lot more hope and aspiration. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that and I remember having a lot of conversations with my supervisor about that. People’s lives always surprise us, there’s much more happening in anybody’s life than what theory can capture. And I think that’s also the interesting part of doing research.

Shivani Nag: Absolutely. The complexities, the nuances take very different kinds of shapes. I’m so glad to have had the opportunity of engaging with your work. It keeps reminding us to not be just rhetorical with research. It is important to listen to what your participants and the context is speaking.

One last question: educational research in India is focused on outcomes, achievements, certain statistical measures, how do you see the role of ethnography? When you try to convince policymakers, they want data or solutions in the form of step one, step two, step three, so if you go to them with a very rich ethnographic work, it impresses them, but it also makes it difficult for them to pick out two things that they can apply towards.

Leya Mathew Yes, policymakers want numbers and steps, but the policymakers I worked with were ethnographic in their sensibilities. Most of the people I’m writing about in the book, they were not looking for numbers. My issue was different. The issue of numbers definitely is there, I’m not discounting that, that’s definitely a hegemonic discourse. But we need to recognize that the critical is an equally hegemonic discourse. We need to hold these two hegemonic discourses together instead of pitting them against each other. It was very troubling to document how critical scholars ended up creating such violent pedagogies. Like you said earlier, one has to listen very carefully, not take anything for granted, whether it comes with the label of critical or radical, instead, really listen and observe and see what the critical turn is actually doing in the world.

In terms of what you can apply, it’s very simple, there should be a functional library, I mean people have been saying that for the longest time. But in a context where English is being understood as socialization, to remember that you also must teach how to read and write became a fresh insight. We have now come to assume language to be oracy or the ability to socialize, we forget that literacy is something that is taught and learned, not acquired. I’m not saying something new, but something that is being forgotten in a particular political economic context.

Shivani Nag: Any last comments or reflections on your journey from the field to putting it out in the form of a book?

Leya Mathew I’m grateful that it got published. I couldn’t have asked for a better series, when I read the series editors’ preface, I was very touched. I’m very, very grateful that it all came together. It’s also important to note that writing a book needs a lot of institutional support. Academic careers also, it boils down to numbers, what are your publication numbers and how does it work for NAAC and CAS. Unless there is institutional support, it’s extremely difficult.

Neha Vora on her book, Teach for Arabia

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Cover of Teach for Arabia by Neha Vora

Interview by Patrick Lewis

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27908


Patrick Lewis:  When I first came across the title of your book, two things came to mind: Betty Anderson’s (2011) history of the project of liberal education at the American University of Beirut and Talal Asad’s (2003) collection of articles on secularism and liberalism in the Arab world. How do you see your work building on or diverging from these earlier approaches to liberalism in the Arab World and why does it matter for how we imagine liberal higher education? 

Neha Vora: Betty Anderson’s work on AUB was indeed one of the texts that really resonated with me and my approach to this project! Anderson considers how a missionary and colonial institution became a central site of Arab politicization (al-Nahda as well as anti-colonial activism). She also has a very interesting section in that book where she discusses how theories of evolution were normalized through protest by medical students and instructors at AUB almost a hundred years before they became acceptable in the US academy, challenging conventional Western understandings of Islam as somehow antithetical to modernity or science. While I do consider the colonial and missionary approaches within Education City’s American branch campus, the contexts and time periods of my project and Anderson’s are of course very different. Nevertheless, she points to the way that these seemingly hegemonic projects lead to unforeseen and sometimes even contradictory outcomes, and she denaturalizes the US academy as the source of knowledge which then supposedly flows to the Middle East. In relation to Asad’s work, I am not in direct dialogue with his work on secularism – there is a chapter in the book where I discuss his earlier work in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter to argue that anthropological ways of thinking about culture have permeated the US academy and its containment of difference. I’m not a scholar of religion but I do think that I approach liberalism with a similar spirit to Asad’s approach to secularism, liberalism, and modernity. That these are mythologies which structure world-making and not reflective of essentialized differences between societies and places. I think we are both engaged in provincializing projects but from different entry points.

Patrick Lewis:  In your discussion of recent higher education reform and Qatarization, you describe a state project to develop post-oil citizenship that envisages a gradual transition away from oil extraction toward an economy built on information technologies and services in which Qatari citizens will perform many of the ‘knowledge economy’ jobs now performed by foreigners. However, you also describe a degree of skepticism, if not outright cynicism, around this transition among locals and argue that new investments in higher education, rather than “shifting economic reliance away from petro-wealth, [are] rather sustained by it” (p. 33), and have in fact increased Qatar’s dependence on foreign academics and administrators. Are there any larger lessons here for regional or national economies attempting to transition away from extractive industries through education or technical training?

Neha Vora: I can’t really speak to lessons on how to move away from extractive industries, as these economies are shaped by much deeper and longer transnational connections and pressure from imperial powers (previously Britain and now the US). My approach to “knowledge economy” is to disentangle its rhetoric from its effects on the ground, which are in fact quite messy and oftentimes contradictory. The book discusses how local elites leverage nativism in nation building projects, of which knowledge economy is one. This is done in the name of a supposedly homogenous group of citizens, but citizens do not uniformly benefit from these projects. I try to showcase the heterogeneity of Qatari citizens and how the idea of Qatariness needs to be consistently rehearsed and performed to have any coherence. I also highlight ways that Qatari leaders produce forms of inclusion for non-citizen immigrants, who are rhetorically and legally cast as perpetual outsiders but are actually integral to the country’s future. Education City is a project that benefits non-citizens as much as citizens, and the Qatari state offers generous financial aid packages for immigrants, which are forgiven if one works a certain number of years in Qatar after graduation. Higher education is quite obviously a space where multicultural futures are being produced. Thus the “transnational Qatar” in my book title.

Patrick Lewis:  Throughout the book you work to push back against boilerplate takes in US academia on American higher education in the Gulf that promote “top-down understandings of branch campuses solely as arms of neoliberal profit or colonial replication” (p. 154). One point you return to again and again throughout the book is the generous public funding that sustains these projects and, in the context of your own experiences working at universities in both the United States and the Gulf, the relative security of your academic colleagues working in Qatar. How might the story of US branch campuses in the Gulf complicate the narrative of the neoliberal university and global higher education – a narrative that these projects are often used to buttress in US academic discourse? How have your experiences in the Gulf shaped your perception of the ‘crisis of the public university’ as it is narrated in the United States?

Neha Vora: One of my entry points into the language of crisis has been to ask whose crisis it is. In this way I am very much in conversation with scholars within a growing field of abolitionist university studies. The kind of nostalgia that US academic crisis narratives traffic in is one that does not acknowledge the exclusionary and violent underpinnings of the university as an institution that has been fundamentally shaped by slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and elitism. Simply by considering the history of the US university, it becomes impossible to separate it from US military endeavors or corporate interests. These are not new entanglements but ones that underpin the academy, so to claim a current state of crisis due to neoliberalization requires some major elisions of that history. I argue that the ability to perform those erasures is only available to a small group of elite, non-precarious (usually white and/or male) academics who have experienced the mythologies of the liberal academy as real (egalitarianism, free inquiry, and inclusion for example). Most of us who learn and labor within the US academy do not have the privilege of that experience. Yet we also replicate liberal mythologies and crisis narratives, especially in the way we view a globalizing university. But the US academy has always been global as well, in that knowledge production has always been a core facet of US imperial violence.

My experience teaching and researching in Education City allowed me to see my own investment in what I call liberal piety more clearly. The difference between an American and Qatari classroom, for example, is not one between freedom of speech and censorship but rather both are spaces in which instructors and students are constrained by particular norms and pushed to perform particular personas. Teaching about Palestine in Qatar, for example, was a rewarding experience in comparison to teaching in Texas or Pennsylvania. I also was able to see how the hierarchies and exclusions of the American academy get reproduced in the Gulf: despite being in a country where most of the people (and most of the students in Education City) are brown, I still had to navigate my (predominantly white) colleagues and superiors as a woman of color in ways that felt quite similar to what I have to do at home.

I also saw how Western administrators utilized nonliberal aspects of Qatar’s immigration and employment structure for the benefit of the “liberal” university (outsourcing custodial work, paying people from different nationalities at different scales, capitalizing on trailing spouses (almost all women) as a cheaper source of local labor, and so on). And the students schooled me quite early on some things that I had blinders to—all international students in the US are dependent on visas and have no opportunity to stay in the country after graduation without securing employment almost immediately. In Qatar, international and immigrant non-citizen students were also visa dependent, but there were more formal and informal avenues to attaining employment after graduation. In addition, the Islamophobia and racism students in Education City experienced when studying abroad in the US made Qatar feel like a much more welcoming place to live and potentially settle, despite the barriers to permanence in the Gulf. The book is not arguing that neoliberal changes are not taking place—they certainly are. But it is challenging the way that criticisms of neoliberalization reify the US home campus as one of liberalism and the Gulf as a space of illiberalism, when in fact there are many things that critics want from the university (state subsidies, resources, living wages, lower teaching load, diverse and inquisitive students) which academics in the Gulf branch campuses experience to a greater degree than those at the home campuses. On the other hand, much of what academics miss from the supposedly eroded liberalism of the neoliberal US academy is in fact the product of things we would consider rather illiberal if they happened elsewhere.

Patrick Lewis:  A significant amount of the book is devoted to exploring different subject positions in the university across differentiated axes of gender, class, race, and citizenship. It considers, inter alia, the relative positions of Qatari citizens and foreigners, as well as between international vs. ‘local expat’ students, and between South Asian migrant workers who often labor in menial jobs (or, as you describe when talking about your own experiences in chapter 5, are imagined to work in such jobs even when this is not the case) and (frequently white) experts from Europe and North America. What does a study of Education City allow us to see about difference and belonging in Qatar, that better-known journalistic and academic work on migrant labor camps for instance, perhaps obscures?

Neha Vora: Some of this I have already addressed in my previous answers. One of the things that we can see through the study of a transnational corporation in the Gulf (and these branch campuses function legally almost exactly like corporations) is that the ethno-racial hierarchy in employment, and the ability to hyper-exploit certain employees (usually low wage from the Global South), is the product of a partnership between global—often Western—consultants and Qatari leaders. In my previous book, Impossible Citizens, I detailed how it was Indian immigrants who were most often acting as the managers (and exploiters) of their less fortunate compatriots. In Teach for Arabia, I look at how larger institutions shape working and living conditions for various immigrants in the country. The journalistic and academic representations of toiling South and Southeast Asian workers in labor camps almost always put the blame for labor exploitation on Gulf governments and citizens when in fact this is a product of transnational elite cooperation.

Patrick Lewis:  Finally, I want to ask about this book’s different audiences and its reception in Qatar and the United States. There is certainly much in this book that would be of interest to higher educational planners in Qatar and the wider Gulf. But it also seems to me that there is a message for US academics and university administrators as well. How did you conceive of the audience for your book and how has it been received in the United States and the Gulf? Has anything about its reception surprised you?

Neha Vora: This book was difficult to write in that I wanted to find a balance between centering what goes on in the branch campuses on-the-ground through my ethnography and offering a criticism of US academia more generally. However, I did not want the ethnographic information to be operationalized just for the purpose of critique, which is always a concern in anthropology. I wanted readers (both in the Gulf and elsewhere) to really get a feel for what different actors in Education City experience and the viewpoints they have on the project. What has been most rewarding is the circulation of this text among students in Doha and hearing that it resonates with their lived experiences in the branch campuses. It was used as a core text by my colleagues at Northwestern Qatar, in a class that all students are required to take about liberal arts education. Many of the things I discuss in the book came to a head last year when Northwestern Qatar students protested the ways they were being treated by faculty and administrators, and the way lower-ranking staff members are also treated. I had a chance to engage some of these students through Zoom last week as a guest speaker in the class I mentioned, and it was a great experience.

At the same time, the reception of the book has been mixed among faculty in the branch campuses. I have received a lot of praise from some, especially faculty of color who find that I articulate some of their frustrations. But I have heard there is also a lot of resistance, with some people even refusing to read the book. I was actually disinvited from a talk at a branch campus after a dean found out I had been invited by my colleague. His reasoning was that Qatar Foundation and Qataris might be offended, which is ironic because I discuss throughout the book how Qatari culture becomes an excuse for (white) American administrators to legitimize choices that work to their benefit. My criticisms in this text are not of Qataris or Qatari culture, but of the ways that whiteness, Americanness, and transnational expertise are leveraged in (re)producing essentialized ideas of cultural and racial difference, to the detriment of both Qatari and non-Qatari students. Colleagues in the US have been receptive to the book but there is still a lot of investment in essentialized and spectacular understanding of the Arabian Peninsula, and of course these are the very understandings that end up producing the structural conditions of inclusion and exclusion in the branch campuses. I have co-authored a book with two other ethnographers of the region, Amelie Le Renard and Ahmed Kanna, which just came out this year and discusses the role of exceptionalism in knowledge production about the Gulf, called Beyond Exception.

Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo takes the page 99 test

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Page 99 of my dissertation, Reification, Resistance, and Transformation? The Impact of Migration and Demographics on Linguistic, Racial, and Ethnic Identity and Equity in Educational Systems: An Applied Approach, contains excerpts from participant life history interviews. I conducted these particular interviews to learn more about what brought some Tejanos (Mexican Americans from Texas) to the Central Florida region known as the Florida Heartland in the mid-20th century. These excerpts are shown at the bottom of this post, and bolded sentences mark comments especially relevant to the goal of the interview.

In the excerpts, two women in their 60s employed as Migrant Advocates in the local public school district shared why they and their families migrated to the area 50 years ago from Texas. They discussed how their families came to pick oranges or manage crews harvesting cucumbers and squash in the Florida Heartland. Because published work on the topic had discussed the movement of Tejanos to the region in the 1950s, but had not specifically identified the county in which my research was set, these interviews provide important context to understanding the role of agriculture in drawing people to the area. Agriculture continued to have a crucial role in shaping the lives of the county’s inhabitants at the time my dissertation data was collected (2014-2016).

In general, page 99 is a good reflection of what the manuscript is about—the movement or migration of peoples. At the same time, the manuscript is about more than that as I focused on how K-12 schools dealt with the movement of peoples and how the schools served linguistic, racial, ethnic, and additional groups. The reason I focused on the schools and this theme is to better understand the micro-interactional processes that socialize students toward particular identities and how these identities articulate with one another at school. Understanding how the schools reproduce inequality at the micro level can help inform approaches aiming to dissuade this social reproduction of inequality.

Rebecca: Now, what kind of work did your family do in Texas?

Maria: My father worked in ranches. They would do irrigation for the cotton. He was in charge of getting the people to pick the cotton. He did mostly field work.

He would more like, when the people would come out of from. What it was, where we lived at, there weren’t a lot of Hispanic people. There was very few. Most were white.

Rebecca: Did your parents ever talk about their grandparents or their parents? 

Maria: They were born in San Antonio, Texas, too. My mother used to say they would work in fields too. In San Antonio; but, sometimes she said they would have to walk to other towns. She said sometimes it would take them three days to get where they were going. ‘They didn’t have no cars, no nothing,’ she would say.

Rebecca: Now why did you guys end up coming here in 1968?

Maria: Because my older brothers and their families were already here.

Rebecca: What brought them out here?

Maria: Picking oranges. My oldest brother came down here with another family like five or six years before we got here. My older brother. Actually, he came to Deerfield Beach. And then, from Deerfield Beach he came over here to [Central]. Well then one of my other brothers came down here. And, he stayed with him for a year or so then he went back and got my father and my mother and us ‘cause by that time were only three. My mother had ten children but the time when we came there was only three at home. Because all my other brothers and sisters were married. So, whenever we got here about two years later after we were here, when my father died, the rest of my brothers came from Texas down here.

[Maria, 61. Interview with author on July 6, 2016]

Rebecca:Okay so, you said you came here in 1970?

Ana: I think 1970, that’s when I married my husband and came this way. His parents used to do the agriculture thing, his father used to be a crew leader. They came here when he [my husband] was young ‘cause he was in school in a [Central].

Rebecca: So what year did your husband’s family come?

Ana: Well, they claim they came on the ‘60s.

Rebecca: And, they were the first Mexicanos?

Ana: Mm. And then his father brung, bring their uncle. There was another guy, he came. They, you know [woman’s name], the one that was with the school board, that run? Yeah, her family came later.

Rebecca:So, what reason did your husband’s family have to come here? What kind of work were they doing?

Ana: They were doing agriculture work. They used to travel like the other ones, you know like the other immigrants. Well, his father had a contract. And he was the contract, for those people; he’s the one that brought a lot of Hispanics and then these were from Texas. They were doing the cucumbers. And squash I think.

[Ana, 67. Interview with author on July 6, 2016]

Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo. 2016. Reification, Resistance, and Transformation? The Impact of Migration and Demographics on Linguistic, Racial, and Ethnic Identity and Equity in Educational Systems: An Applied Approach. University of South Florida, Phd.

The stable URL of my dissertation is https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6474/.

Nicholas Emlen on his book, Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier

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Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier image

https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/language-coffee-and-migration-on-an-andean-amazonian-frontier

Interview by Gaya Morris

This book is an ethnography of multilingualism in the Alto Urubamba Valley, on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru. Here, Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people and Quechua-speaking migrants (colonos) from the nearby Andean highlands live densely interconnected lives. The book explores how people from different backgrounds move between Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish in the many contexts of their everyday lives, as they transform the rain forest into farmland and become coffee producers for the first time.

Gaya Morris: You claim that the ethnic categories of Colono and Matsigenka “are crucial principles of difference in the local social world” but are not “empirical and analytical categories that reliably correspond to actual patterns of interaction, behavior, and language, or even to individuals” (9-10). So what role do these imaginary categories perform in processes of social differentiation and exclusion? What differences do they not mark that they are often assumed to?

Nicholas Emlen: Gaya, thank you for your interest in the book, and for your thoughtful questions.

The language ideology of the “ethnolinguistic group” has a strong hold on the way scholars talk about the social panorama of South America, and also on the way it is conceptualized on the ground. This ideology encourages us to think about Matsigenkas and Andean migrants (colonos) as clearly delineable aggregates of people. But when you look more closely at the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier, it becomes clear that things are a lot more complicated, and that these categories are quite negotiable and contextual.

To understand why, it helps to start by thinking about interethnic marriage, which is by now the rule rather than the exception among Matsigenka speakers in the Alto Urubamba. Most Quechua-speaking migrants to the valley are men, and many end up in unions with Matsigenka women. They either bring those women with them upriver toward the highlands, or those couples stay together in the lowlands. This makes it more difficult, in turn, for Matsigenka men to find spouses, so they travel further downriver and into the remote tributaries to start families, or to bring women back upriver. The result is an opposed system of migratory flows: men move downriver, bringing Quechua with them, while women move upriver, bringing Matsigenka with them.

As a result of this regional interplay between migration, gender, kinship, and language, many children across the Alto Urubamba frontier are growing up in trilingual households, and with a foot in both social worlds. However, this interconnectedness is quite in contrast to the region’s rigid discourse of ethnicity, which takes Matsigenkas and colonos to be distinct groups of people. It’s interesting to see how this disjuncture plays out. For instance, among one group of siblings I know, some live with their mother in a titled Matsigenka community, attend a Matsigenka-Spanish bilingual school, and get counted in the census as ethnically Matsigenka. A few of their siblings live with their father in a nearby colono settlement, attend a Quechua-Spanish bilingual school, and don’t get counted as Matsigenka in the census. With respect to exclusion, the kids living in the colono settlement find themselves treated as ethnic outsiders among their Andean peers. Meanwhile, their siblings in the Matsigenka community are treated as colono interlopers. It’s not an easy situation for anyone. The point is, these categories play out differently depending on the context of interaction, and on the perspective of the interactants.

Gaya Morris: You suggest that “recognizing the interconnectedness of Andeans and Amazonians in the Alto Urubamba is not just an academic matter; it also holds important political significance” (16). What might be the political consequences of overlooking the interconnectedness of these two regions and groups?

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Herve Varenne on his new book, Educating in Life

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https://www.routledge.com/Educating-in-Life-Educational-Theory-and-the-Emergence-of-New-Normals/Varenne/p/book/9781138313668

Ilana Gershon:  This book contains a wide range of ethnographic topics – how did you select what to write about and what to focus upon in these cases?

Hervé Varenne: I did not exactly “select” the ethnographies.  They were a gift from my students springing from the intersection of my interests with theirs, over the past decade.  What may be my own contribution is the organization of the book.  I intend to help make a general point about education, and about culture and, particularly the inevitable drift of any set of forms as people face the arbitrariness of the forms and educate themselves about what do next, collectively.  I always admired Marcel Mauss, and Claude Lévi-Strauss for the manner of their intellectual practice: again and again, on fundamental matters like gift-giving, the body, the classification of people, they proceeded through systematic comparison based on solid ethnographies.  The Trobriand can tell us about the Kwakiutl, and vice versa, as well as about us.  In our case, young girls from the Dominican Republic can tell us about young men venturing other people’s capital, mothers can tell us about teachers, and humans interacting with horses can tell us about everybody—particularly when one of the protagonists is voiceless, or silenced.  And all of them, together, can tell us about “education.”

Ilana Gershon: Throughout this book, you explore instructions and instructions about instructions.   What does a focus on instructing let anthropologists know about social life?

Hervé Varenne: I became a “legitimate peripheral participant” in professional anthropology in the Fall of 1968.  Then, David Schneider asked all the new students taking the required “Systems” course that they read the first 243 page of Parsons and Shils Towards a General Theory of Action (1951).  I did not notice then what was wrong with this theory.  It took me 30 years to shape the argument developed in the book, and first articulated formally in a lecture in 1999: “action” is not based on socialization leading to shared “value orientations” or an “habitus.”  Action is based on ever renewed ignorance about what to do next in the full details of a very particular here and now when all the solutions one may have inherited or developed earlier prove somewhat inadequate.  Of importance is the reality that this ignorance is triggered by what others are doing that one now has to deal with.  Thus, we must start with the assumption that, in any scene, and at whatever scale, all participants must tell each other what they are going to do next and what the interlocutors (those who are addressed or may have an interest in overhearing) should themselves do later even as the interlocutors start stating their own, possibly contradictory, intentions and instructions.

Ilana Gershon: Your book reminded me that lately I have been telling people: revolution lies in micro-interactions.  And of course, the converse would be true as well, the lack of revolution lies in micro-interactions as well.   Although admittedly I try to avoid saying this to Marxists.  I am wondering what you think the political charge of your book is?

Herve Varenne: To the puzzlement of at least some of my students, I asked them this year to read the chapter in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1901) about the “consciousness” of the working class, and particularly their lack of the consciousness Lenin deemed necessary for a true revolution in their conditions.  Most surprisingly perhaps, Lenin argued that this consciousness could only be produced by the “bourgeois intelligentsia” to which Marx and Engels belonged.  As far as I am concerned, this is an early version of the future “culture of poverty” argumentation, directly echoed by Bourdieu and Passeron when they assert that the poor always “mis-know” their conditions.  I asked my students to read Lenin (rather than Franklin Frazier or Oscar Lewis) partially because of its shock value, but also because I will also ask them to read and ponder Jacques Rancière’s many books about, very specifically, the practical consciousness of workers facing their conditions explicitly and looking for “next” political steps that might help them, in the here and now, but which also, in the long run, may lead to altogether radical changes in social structures.  In that sense, farm workers in Southern Illinois who meet to teach themselves how to speak English and develop transcriptions methods, glossaries, and so on (Kalmar 2011), are engaged in “micro-interactions” that may lead to much more.  Rancière’s rants against all those who deliberately refuse to learn from workers and the otherwise “ignorant” are, of course, but a version of Boas’ rants against those who claim knowledge of “them,” and particularly of those who claim to know what “they” need, when all such knowledge is not based on intimate association with the people in their everyday lives.  The difficulty for all revolutionaries, reformers, other do-gooders, and particularly “we,” anthropologists, is that “they” may not go where we want them to go, and that “they” may also be altogether unpleasant, if not dangerous people.  If there is any “political charge” to my work it is the hope that anthropologists will also go to the many “upstates” and “downstates” of their academic localities to listen to people they do not like and against whom they may be struggling in their own politics.

Ilana Gershon: You evocatively quote Bateson in arguing that most of education involves “people working hard at protecting themselves” in the many social contexts and infrastructures that other people have made (167).   For many people who think about education, this may be a surprising turn since the focus is on protecting oneself from one’s contexts.  How did your case studies lead you to be so concerned about protection?  When doing fieldwork, what are the moments someone might want to ask about protection?

Hervé Varenne: I entered anthropology of education by pondering the travails of McDermott’s “Rosa” as she worked hard, in collusion with her peers and teacher, at not getting caught not knowing how to read (McDermott and Tylbor 1983).  I graduated into the field in awe of Garfinkel’s statements about “passing” as that which one is trying to convince others one “really” is—against various challenges that one is precisely not that.  Whatever one’s “identity” the problem is convincing one’s most significant others that “it” is this and not that.  Garfinkel also taught me that we can “trust” that most claims will not be challenged.  After all, challenging is also hard work that may have drastic consequences.  Better to let sleeping dogs lie.  In one way or another, all the ethnographies in the book are about establishing that this, possibly dangerous or new, thing is to become an “it” of some sort for various sets of people, whether it is young girls having fun, biologists making up a lab, capitalists venturing large amount of other people’s capital, mothers taking care of children, etc.  In every case, we report on people being more or less explicitly hurt, people challenging others, people seeking protection, but also people asserting their power even when this assertion might hurt.  I am sure that the administrators of the schools Koyama bring to our attention, even as they fired other administrators and teachers, were unhappy at the resistance to something that must have seemed eminently reasonable. After all, the new curriculum was required by the State, and certified by experts as more helpful for the poor and immigrants everyone was concerned with.  Ethnomethodology confirmed for me something I had noticed and other ethnographers had mentioned.  The only way to find what may be “normal” is to observe a disruption, a moment when one or more of the people are specifically seeking protection for someone else.  But one should also remember that the ethnographic goal may not be just accounting for the normal, but also bringing out the evidence that people, everywhere and everywhen, notice stuff about their conditions, analyze causes and consequences, imagine alternate possibilities, work at convincing others, and deal with the consequences of what they have done.

Ilana Gershon: Years ago, you gave me a remarkable intellectual gift by pointing out that as long as human lack telepathy, ethnographers can never truly study learning.   All ethnographers can truly do is study telling, and people are constantly telling each other who to be and how to be.   This has shaped my fieldwork ever since.  I want to ask, once you establish that any anthropology of education is an anthropology of telling, what are the set of questions that anthropologists of education should be exploring?

Hervé Varenne: Ray McDermott and Jean Lave have been the most influential of my contemporaries on my work.  But we have kept disagreeing on the fundamental point as to whether their work is to be a constructive critique of “learning theories” or whether it should be a more radical destruction of the very possibility of, and need for, such theories.  I keep arguing that we should leave “learning” to the psychologists who believe they can measure ‘it’.  In that vein, I was disappointed when an otherwise welcome recent paper in the American Anthropologist about education and anthropology was titled “Why Don’t Anthropologists Care about Learning …” (Blum 2019).  I dare say that anthropologists should not care about learning but rather that they should care about teaching—with the understanding of course that all teachings will fail (and thus will be “culture” rather than reproduction).  Re-reading Durkheim’s and Mauss’ passing comments about children, what strikes me is that they are always talking about the adults’ effort to “impose upon the child ways of seeing…” (Durkheim [1895] 1982: 53).  The Boasians did assume that such efforts would be successful and produce particular personalities or, as we put it now, particular “identities.”  But this was more a matter of conjecture than empirical demonstration.  It is not of course that children (and older adults) proceed ex nihilo.  It is rather that anthropologists should keep noticing “monolingual” children in English producing forms like “he singed” and then being corrected by some adult “dear, it is ‘he sang’.” They should notice cases like the one Perry Gilmore recently brought  to our attention about children “inventing” a new language (2016).  The first five ethnographies in the book are what I hope more anthropologists will do and that is bring to our attention the emergence of “new normals.”  In all the  cases in the book, the accent is on attempts to transform others or their conditions through various forms of “telling” (explaining, exhorting, teaching, and so on)—even as the teller notices various failures by those told to do what the teller hoped they would do … leading of course to further resistance, imposition, and so on.  As I wrote someplace in the book, “imposition” is the compliment power pays to “resistance.”

 

References cited

Blum, Susan.  2019.  Why don’t anthropologists care about learning(or education or school)? An immodest proposal for an integrative anthropology of learning whose time has finally come American Anthropologist 121, 3: 641-654.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and and Jean-Claude Passeron.  [1970] 1977.  Reproduction in education, society and culture.  Tr. by R. Nice. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Durkheim, Emile.  [1895] 1982.  The rules of the sociological method.  Tr. by W.D. Halls New York: The Free Press.

Garfinkel, Harold.  1963.  “A conception of, and experiments with, ‘trust’ as a condition of stable concerted actions.”  In Motivation and social interaction. Edited by O.J. Harvey, 187-238. New York: The Ronald Press.

Gilmore, Perry.  2016.  Kisisi (our language): The story of Colin and Sadiki.  Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

Kalmar, Tomas.  [2001] 2015.  Illegal alphabets and adult literacy: Latino migrants crossing the linguistic border.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lenin, Ilyich Vladimir.  [1902] 1961.  What is to be done?: Burning questions of our movement.  Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude.  [1962] 1963.  Totemism.  Tr. by R. Needham Boston: Beacon Press.

Mauss, Marcel. [1923-24] 1967.  The gift.  Tr. by I. Cunnison. New York: W.W. Norton.

———-.  [1934] 1973.  Techniques of the body Economy and Society 2: 70-88.

McDermott, R. P., and Henry Tylbor.  1983.  “On the necessity of collusion in conversation.” Text 3, 3: 277-297.

Parsons, Talcott, and and Edward Shils.  1951.  Toward a general theory of action.  New York: Harper and Row.

Jessica Chandras takes the page 99 test

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    Page 99 of my dissertation, titled Multilingual Practices, Education, and Identity in Pune, India, is a first attempt at bringing readers into an ethnographically informed composite sketch of a partially fictionalized student interlocutor. The passage is from a chapter titled “Learning English while Learning in English” and in the chapter I analyze various examples of code switching in English across classrooms in multiple schools and education levels. I generalized the student, Siddhika, from interviews, days of participant observation, and excerpts from classroom recordings that exemplify code switching practices among Hindi, Sanskrit, English, and Marathi, the regional language of the state of India where I conducted my research. The context in which the switching occurs, whether it is in the form of morning prayers, instructional directives, or transitional chatter, was important for my research and analysis. The best way I could convey all of these aspects together, I felt, was if I brought readers into the classroom with me through narrative vignettes. More importantly, I wanted to allow my interlocutors and their experiences studying in and among multiple languages to speak for themselves as much as possible. The passage below begins my third chapter on how English language code switching practices contribute to attitudes and meanings attributed to different languages.

    Pradnya Teacher leads the group of students upstairs, passing pictures of school events and motivational posters showing smiling cartoon animals telling students in English that it is good to help others and reminding them to wash their hands. The Mini KG, Junior KG, and Senior KG students stop in the hallway outside their brightly painted classrooms in the Kindergarten wing of the school. Rather than being in the school where there are so many students constantly moving around and making noise, Siddhika thinks to herself how she prefers to be at home with her aji, Marathi for grandmother, who sneakily passes sweets to Siddhika while she cooks her favorite foods. But she knows she must now start going to school like her older cousins and neighbors who carry around large books in their overstuffed backpacks. Being at school still makes her nervous though, that’s why aai, her mother, packed an extra change of clothes in her backpack today, just in case she wets her uniform again.

    The intimidating Mangal maushi, which means “aunt” and is what the students are told to call the saree-clad women who help in their classrooms, tells Siddhika to place her backpack against the wall and line up. “Warghakade tev, backpack. Linemadhye ubi raha!” Mangal maushi announces in her booming voice, as Pradnya Teacher begins the morning prayers. “Good morning students!” Pradnya Teacher shouts over the din of all the students bustling to line up in the narrow hallway. “Good morning teacher!” Siddhika shouts along with her classmates. “Don’t yell, students! Answer quietly,” Pradnya Teacher retorts, “Stand straight. Hands at your sides. And start.” Siddhika begins reciting the national anthem and then Sanskrit and English prayers that they learned on their first day of class. 

 

    Page 99 also nicely provides a window into my writing process. I eased myself out of research by drafting ethnographic vignettes from my field notes to convey what life of burgeoning multilingual students is like in India. Reflecting on this practice in the process of beginning to write my dissertation now brings a smile to my face. I remember my confidence growing by returning to my notes and making cohesive analytical excerpts emerge to begin my writing stage. As this exercise increased my momentum and enthusiasm to continue writing, the lingering traces of imposter syndrome began to disappear.

    It was after drafting this passage and getting favorable feedback from my committee that I then decided to use vignettes for prologues and epilogues in each chapter of my dissertation, honing my skill and passion for narrative writing to convey my research and analysis. My dissertation explores different avenues of multilingual life and studies in Pune, Maharashtra and after receiving constructive comments on this passage I more confidently included analyses from some unconventional methods such as map making and autoethnography throughout various chapters. I like to think that this passage is the first trial and permission I granted myself to creatively craft a dissertation that spoke to my interests in communicating my analyses, present my research experiences, and the voices of my interlocutors through thoughtful and novel ways.

Jessica Chandras. 2019. “Multilingual Practices, Education, and Identity in Pune, India.” George Washington University, Ph.d dissertation.

Jessica Chandras, Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology

jessicasu87@gmail.com

Jonathan Rosa on his new book, Looking Like a Language and Sounding Like a Race

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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/looking-like-a-language-sounding-like-a-race-9780190634735

Interview by Jessica López-Espino

Jessica López-Espino: Let’s start with your title, what does it mean to Look Like a Language and Sound like a Race?

Jonathan Rosa: The title reflects my long-standing obsession with processes of overdetermination—how categories of identity and expressive practices become ideologically co-constituted, and how perceived boundaries between such categories are enacted interactionally, institutionally, and historically. Looking like a language and sounding like a race is about historical and contemporary forms of governance through which one is expected to fit into categories that don’t correspond to lived experience in straightforward ways. What this means is that, in everyday interactions and encounters with the state, whether in education, housing, employment, or criminal justice, one’s legibility as a subject is anchored in this dynamic of looking like a language and sounding like a race. I’m suggesting that a seemingly casual kind of interplay between people’s recognitions of race and language can also be understood an existential dilemma that is historically inherited and reproduced—and profoundly institutionally consequential.

Jessica López-Espino: You made significant efforts to examine the “contortions” that students at New Northwest High School, a key ethnographic focus of the book, believe in and enact as “emblems” of Mexicanness and Puerto Ricanness, but also show how students’ own ancestry, families, friends, relationships, and desires are often intertwined more than they may initially admit. Can you say more about what analytic tools you developed to avoid reifying or exaggerating intra- and inter-Latinx difference?  

Jonathan Rosa: I developed the notion of ethnoracial contortions because on the one hand I wanted to figure out how people were strategically enacting and constructing identities, and on the other I was interested in the ways that their strategic constructions and enactments were overdetermined. You can strategically use language in a particular way or wear particular clothing or have a particular hairstyle and that does not necessarily mean that your project of the self is going to be rendered legible within a given interactional or institutional context.

I analyze the relationship between denotational texts and interaction texts—transcripts and that which is enacted through discourse—to show how kids say all the time that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are separate races while also regularly engaging in practices that defy that assertion. This was important for me in terms of schematizing stereotypical models of Puerto Ricanness and Mexicanness, but not reducing the analysis to particular stereotypes or presentations of self. By attending both to immediate contexts of interaction and broader historical and institutional conditions of possibility for those interactions, I attempt to avoid ethnographic essentialism, empiricism, and exceptionalism. The tendency toward privileging the pragmatic realm is particularly concerning in ethnographic analyses of race, gender, and class­ because these phenomena do not reduce to embodiment or interaction in straightforward ways.

Jessica López-Espino: In your discussion of outlaw(ed) literacies, you argue that perceptions of Latinx students as not reading are based on raciolinguistic ideologies positioning students as gangbangers and hoes who are unable to produce standardized linguistic forms. What do you think administrators, teachers, and the general public loses by maintaining these raciolinguistic ideologies about Latinx youth?

Jonathan Rosa: A major problem with discussions of language and literacy in educational contexts is the assumption that the nature of the challenge that we are facing is one of deficiency or mismatch. The deficiency narrative is that these kids lack skills all together, they have not learned academic language, they have not been exposed to particular forms of communication early enough in life to then be able to succeed later on in school and other institutional contexts. The alternative is a narrative of mismatch, where it’s not that the kids are deficient altogether, but that they are using different practices. From this perspective, the goal is to build a bridge between home and school practices, which will facilitate mainstream educational success.

In contrast, I wanted to demonstrate that the very practices these kids allegedly lack—that is, standardized language and literacy—can be recognized in their existing repertoires. If these students already demonstrate skills that we are saying they need to learn, then perhaps the problem is that various aspects of their communicative practices are illegible, distorted, or erased from mainstream institutional perspectives. I’m trying to expand the nature of the antagonism to say that this is not simply about building a bridge or scaffolding, it is about the modes of legibility and illegibility that are cultivated within and fundamental to mainstream institutions. Where’s the burden in terms of change? Is it modifying the practices of marginalized youth and communities, or is it transforming institutions that are tied to endemic histories of inequity? I want to argue that it’s about transforming institutions.

Jessica López-Espino: Not “seeing race” in this book is not an option, as racial ideologies center how these students are understood as achieving a presumably upwardly mobile pan-ethnic category as Young Latino Professionals, or negatively as “at risk youth.” Have you faced push back from scholars interested in maintaining a “race-blind” analysis? What advice do you have for anthropologists seeking to challenge the normalization of Whiteness within their work?

Jonathan Rosa: I’ve seen different kinds of pushback. In some moments I was grappling with people who didn’t want to talk about race and figuring out how to communicate with them; in other situations, I’ve encountered people who want to talk about race but in ahistorical, essentializing ways I find troublesome. With people who didn’t want to talk about race, I had to ask what kinds of analyses and insights are made (im)possible by engaging or not engaging with race. Not attending to race allows us to imagine that contemporary societal challenges are merely pragmatic in nature such that diversifying demographics within existing institutions would somehow fundamentally transform them; if you do not attend to race then you will misunderstand the nature of inequality and exclusion. Race is central to the creation of the nation-state, mainstream institutions, and academic disciplines. If one understands the modern world as profoundly anchored in colonialism, then race must be central to one’s analysis of historical and contemporary societies. After all, race and racism emerged as justifications for the globalization of European colonialism.

With those who are interested in studying race but define it in terms of essentialized categories that are understood to be embodied in self-evident ways, it’s important to remember that central to the project of understanding race and rejecting biological racism is a conceptualization of the body as one among many sites for the articulation of race, and a very deceptive one at that. Embodied experiences must be analyzed in relation to colonial histories, so that when we take for granted the recognizability of Whiteness, Indigeneity, and Blackness, for example, that’s often based on a body-oriented mode of analysis. If these contemporary demographics as articulated within a particular societal setting are the primary focus, then I worry that the histories out of which they emerged will escape careful consideration.

Jessica López-Espino: Is there anything else you hope other anthropologists take away from your book?

Jonathan Rosa: I hope that what people take away from this book is a set of questions about governance, about how boundaries are inherited, experienced, and transgressed; I’m interested in contributing to conversations about the broader worlds these boundaries constitute, as well as the existence of alternative worlds that are not often recognized as such. To the extent that the book invites readers to entertain and recognize the possibility and ubiquity of such otherwise worlds, that’s exciting to me.

 

 

Miranda Weinberg takes the page 99 test for her dissertation

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Page 99 of my dissertation, Schooling Languages: Indigeneity, Language Policy, and Language Shift in Nepal, is both representative and anomalous as part of my dissertation. In my dissertation more broadly, I investigated how an indigenous minority established a footing relative to the national majority, and within their own community. Specifically, I looked at the implementation of a language policy in Nepal that gives each community the right to basic education in their so-called mother tongue, in particular the case of the Dhimal language. Individual chapters of my dissertation are focused on different levels of scale involved in regimentation of languages in education, from national decisions to community debates over entextualizing the language in textbooks, from discourse practices in schools to interactions at home that teach children which languages they should learn. In the chapter that opens on Page 99, I followed three schools: the two government schools that had begun to teach Dhimal language by the end of my fieldwork, and a third that was seemingly ideally situated to do so but did not. I found that, while the noun phrase the state implies a coherent actor with unified goals, the state was encountered by people and institutions (such as schools) as a momentary and fragmentary phenomenon. The decisions that determined the distribution of languages in schools were more directly influenced by alignments of political party affiliations and activism by an ethnic organization than any sort of force from laws and policies.

Page 99 of my dissertation exemplifies one of my analytical priorities, which was to listen to children. Children and young people are crucial actors in the realms of schooling, enregisterment, and language shift, all issues that I was concerned with in my dissertation. Yet scholars who share these concerns frequently focus on adults without providing full attention to children’s perspectives. In the case of the vignette presented on Page 99 (see below), children’s perspectives showed that they had no problem listing Dhimal as one of their school subjects alongside others, and that they even enjoyed it. At the same time, it exemplifies challenges of conducting research with children, whose claims can be difficult to interpret.

My page 99:

On a sunny afternoon in December, near the end of my fieldwork, I asked a group of second grade students about their favorite subject:

1 MW: ani timharuko sabbhandā manparne bishaya kun ho? And what is all of your favorite subject?
2 S1: malāi manparne bishaya, malāi cahi manparne bishaya, uh, kun ho My favorite subject, uh, the subject I like, um, which is it
3 S2: malāi thāhā cha I know
4 MW: la bhanna ta? Ok, say it then
5 S3: eh bhanna lāunu na Yeah, make her say it
6 MW: la bhanna Ok, say it
7 S2: Dhimal Dhimal
8 MW: Dhimal ho? It’s Dhimal?
9 Teacher: Dhimal bhāshā, Dhimal bhāshā Dhimal language, Dhimal language
10 MW: Dhimal bhāshā ho? Timro favorite? ani Kamalko? It’s Dhimal language? Your favorite? And Kamal’s?
11 S2: bhan Say
12 Teacher: ke bhannu timile What do you say?
13 S1: malāi favorite bishaya Dhimal bhāshā ho My favorite subject is Dhimal language
14 S4: malāi pani Dhimal bhāshā Mine is Dhimal too

:                 (Group interview, 12/2/15)

 

 

On being asked what their favorite subject was, one by one, all but one of the students in the class reported that their favorite subject was Dhimal. The one exception reported that she favored GK, or General Knowledge. This exchange should certainly not be taken as a transparent reflection of students’ feelings: the teacher of the Dhimal and GK subjects was hovering over the conversation and prompting students to answer, the students knew that I frequently attended their Dhimal class, and the less confident students tended to echo the answers of the first few students to speak up.

 

Miranda Weinberg, 2018. Schooling Languages: Indigeneity, Language Policy, and Language Shift in Nepal. University of Pennsylvania, Phd. Dissertation.

Dr. Miranda Weinberg is a linguistic anthropologist of education and currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Linguistics at Swarthmore College. Her research, conducted in Nepal and the United States, investigates how and when language learning spaces, especially indigenous language revitalization, can support social change. You can reach her via email at mweinbe1@swarthmore.edu.