What Makes Citizenship Sayable or Unspeakable? Habitus, Evidence, and Narrative in Mixed-Status Communities

• In Event: 54.031 - Ethnographic Evidence and Erasure: What Is Knowable and What Counts as Knowledge

Abstract

Objectives.
This paper integrates insights gained from conducting ethnographic research in mixed-status Latino communities with a shared reading of Anna Stoler’s (2013) edited volume Imperial Debris. By doing so, the paper takes up enduring questions regarding enduring educational inequities in the U.S. and the potential for educational anthropology to intervene in the historical and contemporary conditions that give rise to this condition.

Perspectives.
For the past six years, I have examined the ways in which children in mixed-status homes and classrooms are socialized on the basis of their legal status, thereby working to illustrate the development of a ‘habitus of citizenship.’ This ethnographic project attempts to realize the potential that Kulick and Schieffelin (2004) saw in language socialization research, namely its: “potential for enriching social theory. By analyzing ways in which praxis comes to be acquired, and performativity actually operates in situated interactions…” (p. 352). This view of ethnography––as a method used to expand upon social theory and a source of evidence regarding the ways in which historical conditions shape learning and socialization in the present––aligns with Stoler’s focus on the “durable traces [of colonialism] on the material environment and people's bodies and minds” (Imperial Debris backmatter).

Methods.
This paper integrates the micro analysis of audio recorded talk between focal participants––public school teachers, undocumented parents, and their elementary-aged children¬¬––with critical theories on social change. The combination of ethnographic data collected firsthand and critical social theory interpreted in collaboration with colleagues will result in new insights in two areas: first, the particular the educational inequities faced by students in mixed-status communities; second, the lessons learned considering the role of researchers in exacerbating or resisting educational and social inequities more broadly.

Data sources.
Integrating these two corpuses––my ethnographic data and Stoler’s text––furthers my inquiry into the ways in which history and power are encoded in everyday contemporary talk, and supports my ongoing examination of the ways in which beliefs about evidence, knowledge, and discovery shape relationships between researcher and researcher.

Significance.
This paper furthers an ongoing discussion in the field of educational anthropology regarding researcher positionality and ethics, and the ways in which ethnographic engagement can support or undermine social and racial justice in communities living with the legacy of colonialism.

Author

• Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Rutgers University