I try to listen to various podcasts, read blogs, and watch YouTube channels and vlogs in order to supplement, and sometimes to correct or exceed, the reading I do in my doctoral studies as much as possible. The best work, I think, includes collaborations led by immigrant and immigration-focused creators and activists, like Chat It…
Speech, whistleblowing/leaking, and silence: languaging as a political force
Today’s news in many ways is not remarkable, in the sense that we’ve been submerged in a swampy mess of falsehoods and fictions that choke off our view of the world around us (see my recent post about Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, which asserts that our definition of reality is served up to us, hot and…
“Who are you?”: Art as disruptor, generator of public space
At a graduate student conference called Radical Democracy at The New School a couple of weeks ago, I attended a panel in which several students discussed art and artists who sought to disrupt the status quo about how information is shared and important social issues are discussed among the people of any society. Institutionalized processes of dissemination…
My first publication: The limits of pedagogy: diaculturalist pedagogy as paradigm shift in the education of adult immigrants
I’ve published my first solo article, “The limits of pedagogy: diaculturalist pedagogy as paradigm shift in the education of adult immigrants”! Please find the prepublication “Accepted Manuscript” version of “…” here. Enjoy, share, and give feedback! the-limits-of-pedagogy_-diaculturalist-pedagogy-as-paradigm-shift-in-the-education-of-adult-immigrants PLEASE NOTE: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Pedagogy, Culture…
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…
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…
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…
Transculturation: a new culture of signs, new signs of culture
Cultural transformation and the movement of immigrants into, among, within, and across cultural repertoires is an idiom, un modismo, which requires a shift in thinking. Those of us whose realities are nested, in earlier contexts if not the current one, in mainstream thinking, being, and knowing must challenge our assumptions about what is true, what is valid, and,…
