I was walking through Prospect Park near where I’m staying this month in Brooklyn. As I turned a corner, I spotted several small tents with American flag patterns: I thought to myself, oh god, it’s a Trump rally. I’d just volunteered for Hilary Clinton the night before…would that show on my face? With the news about…
What immigrants are good for
It’s an interesting question. A crude parallel can be made between this question and the question of bilingualism. Both enrich the host country (the former, the U.S. or any other literal receiving nation; the latter, the “host” of the speaker’s brain/cognitive function), both contribute various forms of diversity, benefitting the economy in the former case and…
Silence in education and ed research: taking off the crusader’s cape
I’m reading a book entitled “Perspectives on Silence,” an oldie-but-goodie text on the various constructions, interpretations, and meanings of silence from various disciplinary perspectives. I’m very interested in this topic as it relates to my work on how research involving asymmetries of power influence the construction of knowledge, particularly in interviewing and survey-based data collection. Explorations of…
The objects of our mission: disability and subjectivity in social media
A friend of mine wrote an article recently about an interesting phenomenon in the ubiquitous conversation about social media: the use of the Internet to access voice, subjectivity, and visibility in new virtual spaces. The article refers to a mildly ironic story of a Russian website, “Dvach,” which in the past has opened up space for misogynistic…
Be(com)ing a professor
My professors at the Graduate Center tell me that my work as a scholar and a new professor — I work as an adjunct at two colleges in the CUNY system — is a process of socialization, one which involves me becoming a professor as I learn, experience, and grow by doing. I love this idea.…
Relying on “experts” and the problem of expertise
I teach a class about emergent bilinguals and bilingual education in the United States. This week, we’re talking about what constitutes a “successful” program, a highly polemical topic stemming from Civil Rights Era-challenges to the status quo, though the debate about the official language of America and what language to school our children in has origins…
Immersion and the bilingual “every-child-USA” narrative
Students who are first-language speakers of a language other than English are, in America, categorized as English Language Learners, or ELLs, and our country’s history of working with these learners has been complicated and politically fraught. Oftentimes, references to federal decisions such the landmark Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols in 1974 or state-level legislation such as…
Pro-immigrant activism in Boston
Yesterday morning I went with organizers from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (https://www.miracoalition.org/) to the State House in Boston to advocate for the support of amendments to the state budget which protect immigrants’ access to housing, in-state tuition, education, and health care. We spoke with representatives and their aides and interns about this complicated…
The eye in the sky and “low-status” domestic workers
Not long ago, I watched a PBS Frontline video called “Rape on the Night Shift,” an expose delving into the abuse of and violence, often by their own supervisors, against female immigrants who work as janitors for poor wages in buildings that I would wager the majority of Americans have frequented for one reason or another. One…
Discourse, voice, and rightness in an animal rights activist talk
Tonight I attended a talk at the Blue Stockings Bookstore on Allen Street in lower Manhattan with a friend, where we partook in a conversation about animal rights called Animal Rights Campaigning and Racism. Interesting questions framed the talk: How can we campaign for animal liberation while being self-aware of privilege, xenophobia, imperialism, and the…
