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Jonathan Rosa

Photo of Jonathan Rosa

Jonathan Rosa

Associate Professor

jdrosa@stanford.edu

Assistant: Emily Farrell

Office: CERAS 425

Biography

Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Dr. Rosa is also Director of Stanford’s Program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Global Ethnography. His research examines the co-naturalization of language and race as a key feature of modern governance. Specifically, he tracks colonially structured interrelations among racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and institutional inequity. Dr. Rosa collaborates with local communities to investigate these phenomena and develop tools for understanding and challenging the forms of disparity to which they correspond. This community-based approach to research, teaching, and service reflects a vision of scholarship as a platform for imagining and enacting more just societies. Dr. Rosa is author of the award-winning book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press) and co-editor of the volume Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision. Dr. Rosa obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and his B.A. in Linguistics and Educational Studies from Swarthmore College.

Other Titles

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education
Associate Professor (By courtesy), Linguistics
Associate Professor (By courtesy), Anthropology
Associate Professor (By courtesy), Comparative Literature

Program Affiliations

Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE)
SHIPS (PhD): Anthropology of Education
SHIPS (PhD): Educational Linguistics
SHIPS (PhD): Social Sciences in Education
(MA) STEP

Research Interests

Diversity and Identity | Immigrants and Immigration | Literacy and Language | Poverty and Inequality | Race and Ethnicity | Sociology | Teachers and Teaching

See a full list of GSE Faculty research interests >

Recent Publications

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2022). Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics. LANGUAGE LEARNING.

Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2021). Decolonization, Language, and Race in Applied Linguistics and Social Justice. APPLIED LINGUISTICS, 42(6), 1162–1167.

Smalls, K. A., Spears, A. K., & Rosa, J. (2021). Introduction: Language and White Supremacy. JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, 31(2), 152–156.

Jonathan Rosa in the News & Media

The Nation
Stereotypes about language and stereotypes about race are constructed together, says Associate Professor Jonathan Rosa.
June 18, 2020
A hashtag ethnography of the Ferguson protests by Associate Professor Jonathan Rosa notes that social media participation becomes a key site from which to contest mainstream media silences and the long history of state-sanctioned violence against racialized populations.
June 10, 2020
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