JOB TALK: Prof. Jonathan Rosa
“Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Exclusion and Ingenuity in the Learning of Latina/o Identities”
The rapid rise of the U.S. Latina/o population, now the nation's largest demographic minority group, has heightened concerns about the future of “American” identity and brought increased attention to the institutional management of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. In this presentation, which focuses on a predominantly Latina/o Chicago public high school and its surrounding communities, I analyze how schools often (re)produce the very forms of ethnoracial and linguistic difference to which they purport to respond. Specifically, I theorize the co-naturalization of race and language by tracking the ways in which multilingual and multilectal youth, families, and communities come to be viewed as linguistically inferior vis- à-vis monolingual and monolectal ideologies embraced by teachers, administrators, and policy makers. I examine how these dynamics are articulated through educational discourses and policies that frame language as a racialized sign of underachievement, and point to the transformative potential of more inclusive perspectives on racial and linguistic diversity.
Jonathan Rosa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At UMass he holds affiliations with the Language, Literacy, and Culture Concentration in the College of Education, as well as the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o Studies. His community-based research focuses on educational inequality, racial marginalization, and linguistic stigmatization in urban contexts. He collaborates with schools and communities to track these phenomena and develop tools for understanding and eradicating the forms of disparity to which they correspond. In addition to his formal scholarly work, Dr. Rosa is an ongoing participant in public intellectual projects focused on race, education, language, (im)migration, and U.S. Latinas/os. His work has been featured in scholarly journals such as American Ethnologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Anthropology News, and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult literacy, as well as media outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and Univision.
