Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Building on classic and contemporary theorizations of liminality, the proposed symposium offers ethnographic examinations of non-dominant youth’s social and educational lives within and across institutional spaces. This conceptual frame is particularly relevant because non-dominant youth (i.e. post-colonial, migrant/refugee, displaced/orphaned) are often represented as caught in the middle of various polarities (nation-states, languages, home/school domains, etc.) or as having to traverse multiple borders (whether geographical or symbolic). Leveraging anthropological evidence from diverse communities and settings across the globe, the symposium focuses on non-dominant youth’s perspectives on their own experiences of liminality vis-à-vis their ability to negotiate identity, language, learning, and belonging. We emphasize how, in navigating spaces and actions, non-dominant youth situate themselves and draw from their rich repertoires of practice.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 1: Education and Place, Space, Time

Chair

• Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Papers

• "En el Medio"/In the Middle: Indigeneity, Liminality, and Diasporic Consciousness at a K–5 School - Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Caught in Between: Responsibilities and Exclusion Against Young Colombian Refugees in Quito, Ecuador - Diana Rodriguez Gomez, Universidad de los Andes

• Angolan Children’s Experiences in Residential Centers: Displacement, Liminality, and Belonging - Kristina João Nazimova, Temple University

• Liminality and Learning Among Mixed-Status Latina Peers - Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Graduate Center, City University of New York

• From Tú to Todes: Pragmatics and Politics of Puerto Rican Students' Language Use - James Seale-Collazo, Universidad de Puerto Rico - Rio Piedras

• Moroccan Immigrant Children's Social Lives in the Liminal Interludes of Schooling - Inmaculada Maria Garcia Sanchez, University of California - Los Angeles