Unsettling Educations: Language, Race, and Learning in White Settler Colonial Societies

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

While white settler colonialism structures the foundation of contemporary societies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, the ongoing significance of colonialism is often downplayed or erased altogether in a purportedly postcolonial era. This is especially the case in research on language that often reproduce liberal multicultural visions of language diversity that overlook the intersections of language and race as produced through long histories of colonialism. In response to this erasure this session analyzes hierarchies of race, language, and education in white settler colonial societies. Collectively the papers seek to draw on settler colonial critique to redefine educational and broader societal “problems” on the one hand, and reimagine anti-colonial and decolonial theories of change on the other.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 3: Studies of the multiple languages and literacies of varied social contexts

Chair

• Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University

Papers

• Language Policy and Linguistic and Racial Conflicts: An Ethnography of a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal - Huamei Han, Simon Fraser University

• From Reform to Redistribution: Developing a Race-Radical Politics of Bilingual Education - Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania

• Language, Integration, and White Settler National Belonging in Canada - Eve Haque, York University

• (Dis)Possessing Racial and Linguistic Identities: Rethinking Colonialism in the Learning of Latinidad - Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University

Discussant

• Ryuko Kubota, The University of British Columbia