Race, Ethnicity, and Language: Racial, Ethnic, and Linguistic Formations

This course examines the joint emergence of racial, ethnic, and linguistic power formations, as well as the implications of this relationship across a range of historical, societal, and institutional contexts. Synthesizing literatures in linguistic anthropology, relational race and ethnic studies, and education, we approach schooling as a key institutional site in which racial, ethnic, and linguistic borders are learned, naturalized, contested, and reconfigured. We also consider how race, ethnicity, and language co-articulate intersectionally with the governance of differences and various matrices of power, including gender, sexuality, labor, religion, and ability. The approach to denaturalizing racial, ethnic, and linguistic borders that emerges throughout the course is connected to broader projects of unsettling deeply embedded societal hierarchies and transforming institutions through which they are reproduced.