Life as a Chord: Heterogeneous Resources in the Social Identification of One Migrant Girl

Abstract

The social and natural worlds provide heterogeneous resources that contribute both to instances of social identification and to life trajectories. One might claim or be assigned membership in various groups, which emerge at different spatial and temporal scales, and resources for social identification are often combined in novel ways to yield unexpected identities. To account for the trajectories of identification that any individual travels, analysts must determine which configurations of resources become relevant in a given case. Of the many resources that might be relevant to identifying an individual, event, or setting, a few generally become salient-somewhat like several musical notes coming together to constitute a chord. We illustrate this contingent process by describing one young Mexican migrant in the USA, sketching relevant aspects of family interactions, educational practices, local community characteristics, and national discourses. This girl, her family, and other actors combine heterogeneous resources in contingent ways as they navigate and establish an emerging trajectory of identification through which she becomes a 'good reader' .

Revisiting Americanist Arguments and Rethinking Scale in Linguistic Anthropology

“…Scalar analyses, or those that seek to attend simultaneously to phenomena unfolding on different spatial and temporal “scales,” have become increasingly prevalent in sociocultural studies of language. The concept of “scales of space and time” (Lemke 2000) has been influential in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics (e.g., Koven 2016; Lempert 2012; Reyes 2013; Tetreault 2015; Wortham and Rhodes 2013) and related fields, such as applied and educational linguistics (e.g., Bucholtz et al 2012; Canagarajah and De Costa 2015; Collins 2012; Hult 2010; Lin 2015; Mortimer 2016; O’Connor 2016).…”

Islam, Patron Sosial, Pseudo Identitas Masyarakat Perkotaan Di Kota Medan

“…Karena orang pribumi tetap memilki peran yang penting dalam kehidupan sosial sehingga mereka yang berasal dari luar sebagai pendatang memiliki patron dalam bermasyarakat di daerah tersebut. 67 Lain halnya di daerah Medan, kota metropolitan ini sepertinya masih sangat gamang dalam mengekpresikan identitas sosial yang dimilikinya karena masih belum jelasnya patron nilai-nilai identitas sosial yang hendak diusung. Hal tersebut disebabkan latar belakang nilai-nilai lokal yang tidak jelas disebabkan daerah ini merupakan ekses dari pengembangan Kota Medan.…”

The Handbook of Narrative Analysis

“…As I have argued, a bridge connecting these approaches can be provided by ethnography and by specific attention to the local level as the starting point for any kind of generalization. Recent work on interdiscursivity (see Wortham and Rhodes 2013) problematizes the idea that the complex interactions between identities and contexts can be reduced to a binary opposition between micro and macro, pointing to the fact that indexicalities are sustained and built through time and across contexts. Indeed, as we saw in the discussion of communities of practices, processes related to the formation of identities take place across speech events and are the product of sedimentation of narrative practices, roles, and linguistic usage.…”