Migration, Sociolinguistic Scale, and Educational Reproduction

Abstract

Migration-based language pluralism and globalized identity conflicts pose challenges for educational research and linguistic anthropology, in particular, how we think about education and social inequality. This article proposes new conceptual tools, drawn from linguistic anthropology as well as world systems theory, for analyzing the role of schooling in social reproduction and for investigating the dynamics of globalized social polarization. It grounds the argument in an ethnographic study of Latino migrant schoolchildren in upstate New York. [scale, migration, globalization, social reproduction, linguistic anthropology] We live in a globalized world, one characterized by extreme economic inequality and mass migration. Together these features pose significant challenges for many parts of society and for our traditions of inquiry. Migrants seek better lives but encounter new forms of social and economic discrimination, and host societies rely on migrant labor but are increasingly troubled by migrant difference. The Anthropology of Education traditionally investigates the role of social, cultural, and linguistic difference in schooling, but now such differences and the institutional responses they engender are influenced by economic inequalities having national and international dimensions. The Linguistic Anthropology of Education, which rightly prides itself on its sophistication about context in language and learning, must now grapple with globalized processes that result in new forms of linguistic inequality and social polarization.This article explores these issues through a theoretical argument in section two, which frames the analysis of an ethnographic case in section three. The theoretical argument presents three interconnected positions. First, the tradition of social reproduction analysis remains relevant for an anthropology of education because we live in an era of widening, not lessening, economic inequality; but older frameworks must be rethought because they were formulated in and for a period prior to the profound social, cultural, and economic changes we associate with "globalization." Second, we need tools for understanding and investigating how new social divisions and polarizations-that combine ethnolinguistic and ethnoracial differences with social-class divisions and conflicts-play themselves out in schools and the wider society. Third, linguistic anthropology, with its understanding of the situated nature of all meaning-making and its sophisticated study of ideology, offers valuable resources for such inquiry; but it requires as well attention to scale, and in particular, concepts of sociolinguistic scale that encompass global system dynamics as well as operations of power.As anthropologists and language analysts we are interested in how people experience global processes like migration and new forms of cultural and linguistic diversity and how that experience is given shape and meaning by the way they use language and the way language is used with them. Accordingly, our primary empirical...

Migration, language diversity and education policy: A contextualized analysis of inequality, risk and state effects

“…This situation of relative linguistic accommodation differed from that discovered by myself and a research assistant when we studied how Spanish-speaking immigrant children fared in the same region (Collins 2012;Collins & La Santa 2006). One of our sites was a suburban school similar to that studied by Hong -both schools served predominantly middle class and professional populations and were high achieving schools.…”

“…In the elementary school we studied, which we will call Sanderson Elementary, several teachers whose classrooms we observed said that they spoke Spanish. But they were also quick to point out that they felt Spanish should not be used with their immigrant Mexican students, and that they strove to keep Spanish out of school activities, because they viewed the use of Spanish as a potential obstacle to the students' learning of English (see Collins 2012, for further data and discussion). Although the ESL class was taught by an experienced teacher, herself an immigrant, and sympathetic to the linguistic challenges her students faced, in the classroom there was no accommodation to the children's primary language.…”

The Interactional Production of Race and Religious Identity in an Urban Catholic School

“…Indexicality, a term developed from sociolinguistics, illustrates the way language use carries social meaning with it which both reflects and creates context (Agha, 2003;Collins, 2012); over time, people using language in particular ways come to represent certain models of identity. Bucholtz and Hall (2005) suggest that "indexicality relies heavily on ideological structures, for associations between language and identity are rooted in cultural beliefs and values" (p. 594).…”

“…These produced a set of general codes and transcripts, which I in turn subjected to closer scrutiny using core concepts such as indexicality (Wortham, 2003) to identify language processes which implicated racial and religious categories and language use, and helped the students locally and contingently construct identity in and through interaction. To this, I look for metadiscursive talk (Collins, 2012) wherein language and literacy practices were coded as "belonging" to particular groups or of being indexical to a particular kind of interaction. In this article, I closely examine a cluster of examples of "race talk" that overlap themes of race and Catholicism, and subjected transcripts of student talk to close scrutiny.…”

“…This may be participating in a locally-scaled identity, as the majority of African American students at St. Dominic Savio School are not Catholic. Moving up a scale to the parish level (at least in terms of church attendance), there is a modest-sized group of African American Catholics, though none attend the Vietnamese service at which JP or Benny serve (highlighting the spatial and temporal nature of metapragmatic identity models and registers; Collins, 2012;Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc, 2016). Regardless, the Viet boys use a particular set of religious categorizations to exclude Charles from the conversation; Bourdieu writes helpfully about the "struggle to impose the legitimate way of perceiving the power relations… [which] can help to perpetuate or subvert these social relations" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 141), framing these kinds of social interactions as social contestations.…”