Languaging "to Be" Neoliberal: Understanding the Ideological Practices of the Naturalization Process

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: The Politics of Neoliberal Educational Policies: Conceptual and Empirical Examinations of Alternative Educational Visions

Abstract

The hostile challenges facing immigration in the U.S. today needs to be understood as an extension of a much more complex racialized relationship dating back to the formation of the U.S. state through settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and now neoliberalism. Here, neoliberalism and citizenship work together by training potential citizens to be literate in a ‘neoliberal’ ideation of citizenship. Of other things, becoming a citizen through the Naturalization process requires the following requirements; (1) speaking, writing, and reading in English proficiently; (2) demonstrating that one is a person of good moral character; (3) passing an oral civics test in English (USA GOV, 2018). While discrete, the totality of these practices procures acquiescence to a new way of seeing and being through literacy practices that privilege a neoliberal notion of citizenship.

This paper is a study of the ideologies surrounding citizenship. The context of this study is an adult, English as a Second Language (ESL), naturalization course. My research questions posit: (1) What ideologies are embedded within the requirements for citizenship (reading test, writing test, civics test)? (2) To which ideologies and literacy practices are adults in the ESL naturalization classroom being socialized? (3) What are the ways in which the community re-mediates the ideologies and literacy practices of the naturalization process? Cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) acts as a methodological tool to guide how my data will be collected and analyzed. CHAT pushes researches towards historicized, multi-sited, and practice-based understanding of people and their communities as parts of interconnected and overlapping activity systems (Engeström, 1990; Cole & Engeström, 1993). This project will engage with several modes of qualitative methods including: (1) an analysis of Naturalization testing material; (2) participant observation of a Naturalization course and ceremony; (3) interviews with participants of the naturalization course; (4) interviews with a family member of a participant of naturalization course.

The construction of the neoliberal citizen is mediated through the naturalization process and education functions to produce good citizens propelled forward by neoliberal ideologies. Urciuoli (1998) discusses the framing of the ‘good ethnic citizen’- one that epitomizes hard work, the will to better oneself, and the desire to “make it” as an American. Here, the role of language in the nation building process is critical by which language and literacy (Graff & Duffy, 2008) is ideologized and embedded within national identity (Kroskrity, 2010; Blommaert, 1999) that stems from U.S. colonial history (Veronelli, 2015; Fanon, 1987). Neoliberalism positions the learning of English as the gold standard for academic advancement (King, 2009; Bernstein et. al., 2015) and the prerequisite “to be” a productive citizen - a status characterized by an impossibility of never becoming and always becoming.

By foregrounding neoliberal ideologies and language ideologies, this paper will explore how colonial ideologies function to conscript immigrants into a neoliberal imaginary for citizenship by privileging the way participants engage with the course and how these interactions travel beyond the course and into their communities while critically understanding how participants rupture or sustain the imposition of the neoliberal citizen.

Author

• Karen Villegas, University of California - Berkeley