Why do people experience legal institutions as effective sites for political and social transformation? How do people translate political and ethical goals into modalities of law? In Europe many have responded to a widespread sense of political crisis by turning to legal remedies and judicial institutions. One of these institutions, the European Court of Human Rights, provides shared frameworks for combating people's sense of impasse or decline. People experience the Court as a successful rights institution because it shapes and generates shared semiotic forms and repertoires. Through these, lawyers, judges, and rights advocates construct and recognize their actions as efficacious. Yet the experience of efficacy is an unequally shared resource. For some, legal frameworks are the condition of possibility for ethical and professional engagement. But for others, engaging with the law produces frustration and exclusion. Moreover, engaging in judicialized politics shapes some harms as legally legible and actionable, while it shapes others as tragedies beyond reach. [
This article analyzes how trained and certified interpreters navigate ideologies about language interpreting, neutrality, and fairness in a California child welfare court. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork between 2016 and 2018, this analysis demonstrates how trained and certified court interpreters, as well as the attorneys, judges, and social workers with whom they work, distinguish between “off‐the‐record” and “on‐the‐record” legal interactions through shifting demands on interpreters’ labor. The metapragmatic distinctions that court professionals make about interpreting inform practices of interpreting, generate requests for additional forms of ad‐hoc interpreter assistance, and contribute to discourses of linguistic sympathy that center interpreters as central to addressing instances of language marginalization in legal settings. In a court where more than half of the open cases routinely involve Spanish‐dominant parents, interpreters and court professionals depend on court interpreters’ off‐the‐record assistance to meet case‐management goals. However, these metapragmatic distinctions and interpreters’ discourses of linguistic sympathy do little to interrupt systemic forms of marginalization that are reproduced in legal settings. This analysis contributes to theorizations of the interplay of discourses of affective and linguistic labor with institutional goals, as well as of how language ideologies shape interpreters’ social role in legal settings, undermining access to law.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10403431
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Anthropologist
- Volume:
- 125
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0002-7294
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 225-238
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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ABSTRACT law ,politics ,liberalism ,judicialization of politics ,justice ,human rights ,efficacy ,metapragmatics ,Europe ] -
null (Ed.)Background: Currently, most Latinx emergent bilingual (EB) students are educated in English-medium programs alongside English-dominant peers. Legally mandated social integration of EB students coincides with a prescriptive linguistic emphasis on content-language integration in ESL (English as a second language) programs; both integrative approaches are particularly salient in the current hyper-racial climate in the United States. Focus of Study: We explore two schools’ responses to Latinx EB population growth via the intersecting racial and language ideologies informing and influenced by programmatic changes, educator perceptions, and pedagogical practices. Research Design: This qualitative multiple case study spans two Texas schools selected by purposeful maximal sampling over the course of two separate academic years. Data include semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews, and participant observations. Findings: We find that institutional structures across the sites tended to promote a denial of responsibility for racial stratification and a concomitant disciplining of the school curriculum. We argue that both integrative approaches ultimately perpetuated white racial domination. Conclusions/Recommendations: We suggest that ESL research and practice would benefit from an explicit questioning of racializing discourses and boundaries of academic disciplines as part of a racially literate critical practice designed to counter the normalization of whiteness.more » « less
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Background/Context: Bi/multilingual students’ STEM learning is better supported when educators leverage their language and cultural practices as resources, but STEM subject divisions have been historically constructed based on oppressive, dominant values and exclude the ways of knowing of nondominant groups. Truly promoting equity requires expanding and transforming STEM disciplines. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article contributes to efforts to illuminate emergent bi/multilingual students’ ways of knowing, languaging, and doing in STEM. We follow the development of syncretic literacies in relation to translanguaging practices, asking, How do knowledges and practices from different communities get combined and reorganized by students and teachers in service of new modeling practices? Setting and Participants: We focus on a seventh-grade science classroom, deliberately designed to support syncretic literacies and translanguaging practices, where computer science concepts were infused into the curriculum through modeling activities. The majority of the students in the bilingual program had arrived in the United States at most three years before enrolling, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Research Design: We analyze one lesson that was part of a larger research–practice partnership focused on teaching computer science through leveraging translanguaging practices and syncretic literacies. The lesson was a modeling and computing activity codesigned by the teacher and two researchers about post–Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Analysis used microethnographic methods to trace how students assembled translanguaging, social, and schooled practices to make sense of and construct models. Findings/Results: Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing and negotiating both designed and emergent goals. These included sensemaking, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting both the physical and computational models of migration. Conclusions/Recommendations: Implications support the development of theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students to engage in meaning-making through translanguaging and syncretic practices in order to provide new possibilities for lifting up STEM learning that may include, but is not constrained by, disciplinary learning. Additional implications for teacher education and student assessment practices call for reconceptualizing schooling beyond day-to-day curriculum as part of making an ontological shift away from prioritizing math, science, and CS disciplinary and language objectives as defined by and for schooling, and toward celebrating, supporting, and centering students’ diverse, syncretic knowledges and knowledge use.more » « less
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ABSTRACT This article argues that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), a tribunal serving twelve independent primarily Anglophone Caribbean states, uses a variety of linguistic techniques in its pursuit of a regional future. Created upon a complicated (post)colonial landscape and charged with resolving the nonsovereignty of its member states, which, for the most part, continue to utilize the United Kingdom's Privy Council for their final court of appeal, the CCJ does not view sovereignty as a solution. Instead, as I demonstrate through several examples of the Court's use of, talk about, and abstention from language, the CCJ's judges and employees seek to constitute a yet‐to‐be‐fully‐defined nonsovereign region that carves out a Caribbean people, pointedly rejects ongoing British legacies and logics, refuses to adopt the legal practices associated with sovereignty, and strives to remain untethered to either nation‐state or suprastate. [
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As the field of engineering faces looming societal issues, it becomes particularly important to foster more “holistic engineers” with systems-thinking skills and an understanding of the macro-ethical impacts of their work (Canny and Bielefeldt, 2015) Macro-ethics here refers to the collective social responsibility of engineers as a profession, as opposed to micro-ethics, which concern activities within the profession (Herkert, 2005). However, college students studying engineering in the United States exhibit a decline in concern for public welfare over the course of their education (Cech, 2014) as well as a tendency to orient to micro-ethical issues over macro-ethical issues (Schiff et al, 2020). Scholars attribute these trends to ideologies pervasive in engineering spaces, such as depoliticization of engineering practice, technocracy, and meritocracy (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015). While Cech (2014) argues these status quo ideologies in engineering are maintained by a “culture of disengagement” that decreases interest in public welfare, Radoff et al. (2022) find indications that additional factors contribute to engaged students’ reproduction of such ideologies. They find, for example, instances of students in reproducing dehumanizing narratives regarding low-income communities, despite their enrollment in a voluntary program premised on cultivating socially responsible STEM professionals. This finding suggests that even students who remain “engaged” to some degree can reproduce status quo ideologies which Cech (2014) attributes to disengagement. One explanation as to why a macro-ethically “engaged” student may fail to attend to the social aspects of design follows a deficit narrative: a lack of knowledge or ability. We see this assumption in comparisons of students’ and experts’ design processes, where the areas in which students behave differently than experts are interpreted as areas that require additional instruction on how to behave more like the experts (Atman et al., 2008). This presupposition of students’ lacking knowledge or skills, however, backgrounds contextual or interactional factors. Philip et al. (2018) challenges such assumptions in their analysis of a classroom discussion on the ethics of drone warfare, which exemplifies students’ convergence to American nationalism, but with the framing that this convergence is interactionally created, rather than the result of individual students’ stable, dogmatic beliefs. However, because their analysis is limited to the scope of a single class discussion, the extent to which students’ performance is situated in said class remains unclear. In this paper, we attempt to understand the ways in which students reproduce ideologies dominant in engineering, as well as the situated nature of students’ ideological orientations in collaborative work. We consider a case study focus group from Radoff et al. (2022) where students reasoned through a hypothetical design scenario about a grocery store. We show how, despite many opportunities where problematic status-quo narratives are momentarily challenged, the students generally reject the challenges, not by arguing against them, but by positioning them outside the scope of their work. Further, we show how these moments of rejection are tightly coupled with attempts to emulate the multinational technology company Amazon. Finally, we use additional data to illustrate the situatedness of one student’s performance, and theorize the influence of Amazon as a “strange attractor” in this student’s situated reasoning.more » « less
