SSP Forum: Jonathan Rosa on Unsettling Raciolinguistic Barriers

The
Symbolic Systems Forum
presents

Unsettling Raciolinguistic Barriers: Redefining Communicative “Problems” and Reimagining Decolonial Possibilities

Jonathan Rosa
Graduate School of Education

Tuesday, May 9, 2023
4:30-5:20 pm
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460), Room 126

ABSTRACT:

Colonial and imperial histories and contemporary realities often lead to the framing of marginalized populations’ linguistic practices as learning impediments, thereby scapegoating them as primary causes of educational and broader societal problems. This presentation draws on critical decolonial perspectives to understand the historical and contemporary consolidation of borders delimiting languages, identities, and geographies. Such a reconceptualization points to opportunities for reckoning, redress, and reimagination that emerge when we approach marginalized communities not as communicatively deficient, but rather as dynamic linguistic contexts that unsettle conventional assumptions about knowledges, institutions, and possible worlds.
 
BIO:
 
Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is also Director of Stanford’s Program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Global Ethnography. Rosa's research centers on joint analyses of racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and educational inequity. He 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). Rosa’s research 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, NPR, The Nation, and Univision.

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