Pluricultural Perspectives on Plurilingual Identity: A Critical Intersectional Literature Review

Rebecca Schmor, University of Toronto

Abstract

Drawing on a methodology of intersectionality, this critical literature review synthesizes existing knowledge on the topic of plurilingual identity while critically prioritizing studies produced by traditionally marginalized scholars from historically excluded contexts. The first part draws on a larger set of articles (n=114) written in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese to investigate who(se research) is represented in this topic area. The second part explores what themes are present in a subset of 18 studies which represent the least cited articles written by female scholars in peripheralized contexts. The first part of this review finds that research on plurilingual identity is predominantly written in English and French and underrepresented in Italian and Spanish. Findings from the 114 articles show a dominance of female authors affiliated with core countries writing on (neo) liberal themes. The second part of this review reveals that, within the subset of 18 articles, there was no evidence of a connected theory or demarcated definition of plurilingual identity. As such, this review identifies the need for a distinct conceptualization of plurilingual identity itself while contributing to the development of intersectional methodology and advocating for increased transparency of author positionality.

Résumé

S’appuyant sur une méthodologie d’intersectionnalité, cette revue critique de la littérature synthétise les connaissances existantes sur le thème de l’identité plurilingue, tout en priorisant les études produites par des chercheurs traditionnellement marginalisés et de contextes historiquement exclus. La première partie s’appuie sur un ensemble plus vaste d’articles (n = 114) rédigés en français, anglais, allemand, espagnol, italien et portugais pour déterminer qui est représenté dans ce domaine thématique. La deuxième partie explore les thèmes présents dans un sous-ensemble de 18 études qui représentent les articles les moins cités écrits par des chercheuses dans des contextes périphériques. La première partie de cette revue constate que la recherche sur l’identité plurilingue est majoritairement rédigée en anglais et en français et sous-représentée en italien et en espagnol. Les résultats des 114 articles montrent une prédominance d’auteurs féminins affiliés aux pays dominants qui écrivent sur des thèmes (néo)libéraux. La deuxième partie de cette revue révèle que, dans le sous-ensemble de 18 articles, il n’y avait aucune preuve d’une théorie connexe ou d’une définition précise de l’identité plurilingue. Par conséquent, cette revue identifie le besoin d’une conceptualisation distincte de l’identité plurilingue elle-même, tout en contribuant au développement d’une méthodologie intersectionnelle et en plaidant pour une transparence accrue de la positionnalité de l’auteur.

2023 • Vol. 7(1) • 107 – 124 • ISSN 2561-7982 •

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

June 25, 2023June 26, 2023

Chinese Student Newcomers’ Transition to a Canadian Postsecondary EAP (English for Academic Purposes) Program: Bicultural Responses and Acculturation

Chuanmei Lin, McGill University
Cameron Smith, University of Ottawa

Abstract

The study investigated the cultural and linguistic lived experiences of Chinese international student newcomers in a Canadian postsecondary English for Academic Proposes (EAP) program. This article aims to explore Chinese students’ transition trajectories within an educational institution in Canada. As Chinese English learners are immersed in Canadian tertiary education settings, their assumptions about knowledge and culture will be challenged, impacting their identities and learning trajectories. Experiences of integration can be positioned across a continuum of bicultural practices, favouring the home or host cultures, depending on how newcomers select and respond to the acculturation process. In this study, we argue that Chinese-dominant biculturalism is one type of response to the host culture by students who have limited English proficiency and little contact with the larger Canadian society. On the other hand, Canadian-dominant biculturalism is another response type that marks an ongoing adjustment of identity loss, transformation, and reclamation, which involves a process of transforming identity between the initial feelings of loss and final reclamation as participants work through experiences of marginalisation. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of Chinese students’ trajectories and have implications for how home and host institutions can support these students as they embark on their studies internationally.

Résumé

Cette étude a porté sur les expériences culturelles et linguistiques vécues par les étudiants internationaux chinois nouvellement arrivés dans un programme postsecondaire canadien d’anglais sur objectifs universitaires. Cet article vise à explorer les trajectoires de transition des étudiants chinois au sein d’un établissement d’enseignement au Canada. Au fur et à mesure que les apprenants chinois s’immergent dans l’enseignement supérieur canadien en anglais, leurs hypothèses normatives sur les connaissances et la culture sont remises en question, ce qui a un impact sur leurs identités et leurs trajectoires d’apprentissage. Les expériences d’intégration peuvent être positionnées sur un continuum de pratiques biculturelles, favorisant la culture d’origine ou la culture d’accueil, en fonction de la manière dont les nouveaux arrivants choisissent et réagissent au processus d’acculturation. Dans cette étude, nous soutenons que le biculturalisme à dominante chinoise est un type de réponse à la culture d’accueil par les étudiants qui ont une maîtrise limitée de l’anglais et peu de contacts avec la société canadienne dans son ensemble. D’autre part, le biculturalisme à dominance canadienne est un autre type de réponse qui marque un ajustement continu de la perte, de la transformation et de la récupération de l’identité, ce qui implique un processus de transformation de l’identité entre les sentiments initiaux de perte et la récupération finale au fur et à mesure que les participants travaillent à travers des expériences de marginalisation. Nos résultats contribuent à une meilleure compréhension des trajectoires des étudiants chinois et ont des implications sur la manière dont les établissements d’origine et d’accueil peuvent soutenir ces étudiants lorsqu’ils entreprennent leurs études à l’étranger.

2023 • Vol. 7(1) • 68 – 86 • ISSN 2561-7982 •

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

June 18, 2022June 23, 2022

Identity Construction of Places through Translanguaging in Jakarta: A Linguistic Landscape of Gambir Train Station

ANNA MARIETTA DA SILVA, ATMA JAYA Catholic University of Indonesia
DENY ARNOS KWARY, Airlangga University, Indonesia ¹

ABSTRACT. Linguistic landscape studies provide a lens for examining the evolving relationship between speakers and the spaces they live in, particularly the public spaces such as commercial streets, tourism resorts, and train stations and display distinct identities of the places. This paper analyses the distribution of signs, establishments, and languages at Gambir train station in Jakarta, Indonesia to reveal the linguistic elements which contribute to Gambir’s identity transformation from a local (Jakarta) train station to an international hub and social space for both local and international travellers and non-travellers alike. The findings show that the dominant signs in Gambir station are not related to travel by train; rather they are related to either food and beverage establishments or the infrastructure of the station. The study finds that bilingual signs are dominant in the travel-by-train-related signs, whereas signs that align with conceptions of ‘translanguaging’ are dominant in among non-travel-by-train related signs (e.g. in food and beverage establishments). The analysis reveals that through the use of different linguistic resources, the identity of Gambir station has changed from local and travel- oriented to one that is muti-faceted, is encompassing a wide variety of commercial spaces and users of these commercial spaces.

RÉSUMÉ. Les études sur le paysage linguistique permettent d’examiner l’évolution de la relation entre les locuteurs et les espaces dans lesquels ils vivent, notamment les espaces publics tels que les rues commerçantes, les stations touristiques et les gares. Cet article analyse la distribution des signes, des commerces et des langues à la gare de Gambir à Jakarta, en Indonésie, afin de mettre en lumière les éléments linguistiques qui contribuent à la transformation de l’identité de Gambir, d’une gare locale à une plaque tournante internationale et un espace social pour les voyageurs locaux et internationaux et les non-voyageurs. Les résultats montrent que les signes dominants dans la gare de Gambir ne sont pas liés au voyage en train, mais plutôt à des établissements de restauration ou à l’infrastructure de la gare. Les panneaux bilingues sont dominants dans l’affichage relatif au transport, tandis que les panneaux révélant des pratiques translinguistiques sont dominants dans l’affichage non lié au transport (par exemple, dans les établissements de restauration). L’analyse révèle qu’à travers l’utilisation de différentes ressources linguistiques, l’identité de la gare de Gambir a évolué, de locale et axée sur le voyage à multifacettes, englobant une plus grande variété d’espaces commerciaux et d’utilisateurs de ces espaces.

¹ The co-author of this article, Deny Arnos Kwary, sadly passed away on 4 June 2019.

July 2, 2021July 2, 2021

The Complexity of International Student Identity

Wei Liu, University of Alberta

Andy Rathbone, University of Alberta

Abstract: Complexity Theory is a revolutionary research paradigm that emphasizes holism, uncertainty and nonlinearity, and de-emphasizes reductionism, predictability and linearity (Grobman, 2005). This critical literature review applies Complexity Theory to the area of student development, arguing that Complexity Theory is a fruitful theoretical lens to examine the complex issue of cross-cultural identity construction of international students. From this theoretical lens, international student identity should be seen as an open system that is fluid and emergent in nature, and educators should contribute to an additive international student identity that embraces multiple languages and cultures. A perpetual state of discomfort due to the development of a narrative identity should be encouraged as a cross-cultural strategy conducive to international students’ continuous learning.

Résumé: La théorie de la complexité a été un paradigme de recherche révolutionnaire qui souligne l’holisme, l’incertitude et la non-linéarité et désaccentue le réductionnisme, la prévisibilité et la linéarité (Grobman, 2005). Cet examen critique de la littérature applique la théorie de la complexité au domaine du développement des étudiants, en faisant valoir que la théorie de la complexité est un point de vue théorique fructueuse pour examiner la question complexe de la construction de l’identité interculturelle des étudiants internationaux (EIs). Dans ce point de vue théorique, l’identité du EI doit être vue comme un système ouvert qui est fluide et de nature émergente, et les éducateurs doivent contribuer à une identité additive de les EI qui englobe plusieurs langues et cultures. Un état d’inconfort perpétuel dû au développement d’une identité narrative doit être encouragé comme une stratégie interculturelle approprié pour l’apprentissage continu des EI.

Keywords: Complexity Theory, international students, identity, narrative identity, care.

Introduction

There were over 5.3 million international students around the world as of 2017, up from 2 million in 2000 (UNESCO, 2020). Away from home, international students face many common challenges, such as language barriers, financial difficulties, cultural adjustment, and an uncertain future (Khanal & Gaulee, 2019). They need to adjust to new social and learning environments that pose difficulties related to different learning expectations, a sense of non-belonging, and even mental health issues (Hale et al., 2020). At a deeper level, the intercultural learning experience of international students is both transitional and transformational, and necessitates identity change to a greater or lesser extent (Gu, et al., 2010). The ability to successfully manage one’s identity reconstruction in the international education context is a necessary cross-cultural competence for international students and scholars (Deardoff, 2006). Helping international students successfully navigate the cross-cultural identity reconstruction process is an important dimension of international student education in host universities and countries.

What is the role of international educators in this regard? What attitudes should educators adopt and what approaches should they take in order to contribute in a constructive way to identity reconstruction for international students? In this critical review paper, we first discuss different definitions of identity in the context of international education from diverse perspectives, which serve to show that cross-cultural identity reconstruction is a potentially challenging and even painful process. We then critique the unidirectional, ethnocentric, and acculturational discourse commonly found in international student education practices as part of a harmful postcolonial paradigm that works to perpetuate the current inequitable world structure. Based on a review of the highly complex nature of international student identity, we endeavor to develop a new philosophy of international student education and development, drawing on insights from Complexity Theory as it relates to narrative identity.

An effective critical review presents, analyses, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature from diverse sources with the goal of generating new knowledge about a topic in the form of a new model, a new framework, or a new perspective (Grant & Bootht, 2009; Torraco, 2005). We cast a wide net in this review of the theoretical literature on identity in the context of international student education by including both older, classical works and more recent publications. The collaboration of an international educator and an educational philosopher with a common interest in Complexity Theory allowed us each to tap relevantly into the literature in our respective fields. Without claiming to aggregate and synthesize all available literature in an explicitly structured way, a critical review focuses on the conceptual values of relevant literature to provide new insights on the chosen topic (Grant & Bootht, 2009). In other words, it is supposed to purposefully and critically select the most relevant works in relation to the topic. We decided to include the works in this study based on their contribution to the construction of the three pillars of Ontology, Epistemology, and Axiology as they evolve around Complexity Theory as a new philosophical paradigm for understanding international student identity. Pedagogy is added as a pillar to demonstrate how the new paradigm applies to international student education on the ground. The paper does not claim to be an endpoint in the discussion of the issue of international student identity. Instead, it hopes to start a new phase of conceptual understanding of international student development informed by a radically different philosophical perspective from the dated one still prevalently used today.

Identity Reconstruction For International Students

In the area of student development, identity is often understood as students’ secure and comfortable conception of who they are as autonomous, independent individuals (Checkering, 1969). Words like “autonomous” and “independent” emphasize the agency students have over their own identity choices, agency which is advocated for in this paper. Words like “secure” and “comfortable” signify stagnation in student learning and development, a concept which is questioned in this paper. One’s identity can also be defined as a person’s personally held beliefs about self in relation to social groups and the ways one expresses that relationship (Torres et al., 2009). We prefer this definition, as it does not suggest an end state of “secure and comfortable” self. Instead, defining identity as personal beliefs of self suggests its potentially fluid nature. It also suggests the relational nature of self, including the position of group membership in one’s identity construction.

From a poststructuralist perspective, identity has been seen in the light of “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (Norton, 2000, p.5). This definition further strengthens the complex, subjective, fluid, and relational nature of our identity, which resonates strongly with the theme of this paper. From a psychological perspective, identity reconstruction is typically seen as the result of perceived disequilibrium or dissonance between the current self and a possible self (see Marcia, 2002). Environmental changes, such as international traveling and sojourning, create opportunities and conditions for identity reconstruction (see e.g. Bronfenbrenner, 1979). The intercultural learning experience has the potential to bring about profound changes in overseas students’ self-perception, transforming their understanding of the learning experience, self-knowledge, awareness of the other, values, and worldview (Gill, 2007). Cross-cultural identity reconstruction can be said to be an important aspect of intercultural learning for international students as they have to ask deep questions about who they are in new cross-cultural contexts.

The reconstruction of self-identity coincides with a process of leaving the comfortable world of self and encountering and interacting with the cultural other (Gill, 2007), and within such an intersubjective space, it is an imperative for international students to re-examine self in relation to new cultural and social groups (Bruner, 1996). Psychological disequilibrium in cross-cultural identity shift can be understood as the psychological discomfort experienced by people who have moved out of their cultural comfort zone. Such discomfort can be small to some individuals, but can be nerve-breaking to others. As the phrase “culture shock”, a phrase commonly used to characterize the cross-cultural experience, indicates, identity change is a potentially confusing, challenging, and even painful journey—so much so that research from the 1950s to 1980s often saw it as a mental health issue (see Ward et al., 2001). A better understanding of the nature of international student identity change and reconstruction is needed to better assist them in this challenging aspect of their international learning journey.

Acculturation As An Approach To International Student Education

International student mobility is influenced by “push and pull” factors (Altbach, 1998). International students are “pushed” by unfavourable conditions at home, and “pulled” by more favourable conditions host countries offer. As a result, the direction of movement of the world’s international students tends to be away from developing countries towards industrialized western countries (Altbach, 1998). Asian students represent 53% of all international students enrolled worldwide, mostly from China and India; of that, 83% study in G20 countries and 77% in OECD countries (OECD, 2020). Similar to the direction of mobility, the cross-cultural transition of international students has been historically conceptualized as a unidirectional and unidimensional journey. As they acquire the values, beliefs, and cultural behaviors of the host country, they are expected to discard those of their home country (Schwartz et al., 2010). It is this acculturational approach to international student education and development that we take issue with in this paper.

The most dominant paradigm in work with international students today is still an ethnocentric one (Davis, 2011). It positions the host country language and culture as the superior centre, and the acquisition of the host language and culture is believed to hold the potential to elevate international students into first-class world citizenship (Lin & Liu, 2019). Under the influence of this unidimensional discourse,

It is fair to say that the international student education/service in most English-speaking countries still focuses on students’ acculturation, adjustment, adaptation, and integration into the host university, changing their previous habits in learning or living to fit into the new academic environment. (Liu & Lin, 2016, p. 357)

The acculturation perspective reinforces the marginalization of non-western national identities and cultures. The path of international students has been seen as a one-way path. But what alternative theoretical paradigm can take the place of such a postcolonialist stance on international education and better serve the cross-cultural development of international students? This paper is an attempt to address this question.

The complexity of international student identity

In the 1980s, a dual dimensional approach was introduced in cross-cultural research, upon the realization that the newcomers’ acquisition of host country culture does not necessarily require the abandonment of their home culture (Berry, 1980; Schwartz, et.al, 2010). In Berry’s (1980) multicultural model, host culture acquisition and heritage culture retention are seen as two independent dimensions. The two dimensions intersect to create four cross-cultural strategies for new immigrants: assimilation (adopting the receiving culture and discarding the heritage culture), separation (rejecting the receiving culture and retaining the heritage culture), integration (adopting the receiving culture and retaining the heritage culture), and marginalization (rejecting both the heritage and receiving cultures). Of Berry’s four categories, integration is thought to be the most beneficial strategy in securing the newcomers’ social and psychological wellbeing. Though it is an improvement on the unidimensional model, Berry’s dual-dimensional model has been criticized.

One important limitation is that it adopts a “one size fits all” approach, and thus has failed to consider many other contextual factors–such as type of migrant, the countries of origin and settlement, the socioeconomic status and resources, the ethnic group in question—and their fluency in the language of the country of settlement (Rudmin, 2003). Such factors are highly individualized and their combinations are potentially impossible to exhaust in studies that hope to pin down the patterns of change for all international students as a uniform group. Recognizing this complexity, Schwartz et.al (2010) believe that, although it has been clear that something is assumed to change as newcomers adapt to life in the host cultural context, “exactly what that something is has been difficult to pin down” (p. 240). The experience of each newcomer is so diverse and complex that it can be seen as a cross-cultural black box. Any attempt to simplify or reduce such diversity and complexity to a few finite options is futile. Any attempt to conceptualize international student identity development in fixed, linear, and temporal phases (e.g., Eunyoung, 2012) is limiting and potentially harmful. A broader theoretical lens is needed to allow international educators to understand the complexity of the identity development processes of international students.

International student identity as a complex open system: The ontology

To replace the dated acculturational approach to international student identity development, this paper proposes the adoption of Complexity Theory as an alternative philosophical framework on this issue. Complexity Theory is a breakaway from the Newtonian view of the “clockwork universe”, in which the society is seen as a rational, closed, controllable, and deterministic system (Morrison, 2008). Instead, Complexity Theory emphasizes holism, uncertainty, and nonlinearity, and de-emphasizes reductionism, predictability, and linearity (Grobman, 2005). It acknowledges life as a complex system. “Life is complicated. It is simplifying but dangerous to have one overriding concern that makes others unimportant.” (Bateson, 1994, p.106) Complexity Theory embraces the irrational, open, uncontrollable, and fluid nature of the human condition, as “(f)luidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live” (Bateson, 1989, p. 13). The theory sounds complex and even messy, but it is at the same time liberating and empowering, as there are multiple paths for one to follow.

Relating complexity to identity, Hall (1992) believes that there are three competing conceptions of self: the enlightened self, the social self, and the postmodern self. The enlightened self is the innate, core self-identity, which moves along a linear trajectory of development. We can see that the enlightened self does not honour the complex and fluid nature of identity. Different from the enlightened self, the social self is seen as the result of interaction and mediation between self and social context. One’s social self identity is defined by group membership, and positive self-esteem relies on a sense of belonging to a community. The third, postmodern self is an identity that is not fixed but fluid, dynamic, evolving, and performative in nature (Josselson, 1996). The social self and the postmodern self interact to make identity construction a highly complex process. According to Carr (1986),

[…] the social world consists of pre-established social roles and ongoing stories not of my making […]. Human existence is to be understood as a matter of assuming and acting out the parts determined by the already existing repertoire of roles, finding oneself caught up in already ongoing stories—including one’s own life story. (p.84).

One is born into a family and a society not of their choosing. In this sense, one is assigned social roles and a set of social relationships, and there is a certain expectation that one lives up to these roles and maintains these relationships. When students travel to another country to study, they get in touch with new social groups in the host country. In other words, their lives become more intersectional (Dill & Zambrana, 2009), assuming more memberships and playing an increasing number of roles in addition to the roles they have had before. Such increased intersectionality of roles in different cultural settings creates social identity complexity (Roccas & Brewer, 2002), the effect of people holding memberships in multiple social groups whose values are not fully convergent or overlapping. In this sense, social interaction choices are central to the formation of the mind and the self, as “(i)t is through our varying degrees of involvement with different social groups that we are able to carve out a sense of individual identity” (Grimshaw & Sears, 2008, p. 265). One international student from India is quoted by Gu et. al. (2010) as saying,

[…] when you go to another country and study and you meet people from other countries, then it opens up your perspective and you realise that everything in the world is not the same … You are so torn between being yourself and what they want you to do—what others want you to do. (p. 19)

What the student is experiencing here is something we often call an “identity crisis,” and that crisis results from identity options, particularly when there are tensions between these options. We need to stress here the issue of language in the international student identity reconstruction process. In the social turn of second language research (Block, 2003), language learning is seen as a social practice and a socialization process. One who is short of native-like proficiency in the language of the host society, which is often the case for international students, tends to suffer from a “reduced personality” and the identity of “being a half-wit” (Harder, 1980). According to Bourdieu (1977), language has symbolic power, and such power is distributed unevenly. In Liu’s (2014) autobiographical account of his ESL learning experience, he recalls:

The high status of English in China turned into my inner motive to acquire an identity as someone who speaks English well. However, at a more advanced competency level, I experienced a crisis of identity split between my English identity and my native Chinese identity, especially after becoming aware of an unequivocal postcolonial linguistic discourse that positions the two languages differently. (p. 264)

Due to the close connection between national language and national identity, one may experience tension between their native language and the target language they are acquiring, as different languages carry different value systems and representational powers.

The poststructural perspective views identity as a site of struggle influenced by unequal power relations (Norton, 2000). Some identity options are more valued than others in the dominant discourse. For international students, integration by acculturating to the host country standard and speaking the host country language at the level of first language proficiency is often held above all other identity options. However, international students are not totally at the mercy of external structure and conditions. According to Weedon (1987), one has agency to negotiate a relationship with the social community. Similarly, Norton (1997) believes that one can exert agency by making different levels of investment in acquiring a new language and thus the new cultural identity that is tied to the new language. Along the same line of thinking, Ricoeur (1992) suggests that we are like characters in a story, aiming towards a better life through change in words and action. The identity negotiation and reconstruction process is the process of “self-organization” (Montuori, 2003), self-adjusting and evolving in response to disequilibrium presented by changing environments.

There is a tension here between social determinism and human agency. This is the tension between the postcolonial condition that perpetuates unfair power structures and the postmodern condition that supports individual agency in identity choice. The social self and the postmodern self intersect dynamically to make an international student’s identity extremely complex. It is an intercultural imperative to see international student identity in cross-cultural transition as a complex system due to the increased layers of challenges in their experiences, such as cross-cultural transition and second language acquisition. The system is subject to structure-agency dialectic tension and the different levels of involvement with different social groups as a result of exerted self-agency and choice. For complexity theorists, each learner is a non-linear, organic, open, and emergent system that involves constant change, evolution, adaptation, and development. According to Osberg (2005),

[i]f we want to shape human subjectivity in a way that is not linear or deterministic, then we cannot assume we know (once and for all) what or who we are dealing with at the outset, and we cannot have a pre-set goal (an idea of what this person should become) […]. From this perspective, if we try to shape human subjectivity in a predetermined way, we obstruct the emergence of human subjectivity. (p. 82)

One important note we need to add here is that students should have their own personal goals, and educators should play a role in showing them the options and encouraging them to pursue higher ones, but educators are not in a position to impose on their students a goal of their determination, no matter how good the intention is.

International student narratives as identities to live by: The epistemology

If the ontology of international identity is an open, fluid, and complex system that emerges through self-organization and self-authorship (Baxter Magolda, 2001) in response to dynamic social conditions, how do we go about studying it? Ricoeur (1992) points out that our identity is narrative in nature, and thus our identity is our narrative identity. Ricoeur describes narrative identity as the ability to recognize that our story is changing and that we have some control over that change through our interpretations and actions. Different from the grand narrative (see Lyotard, 1976), which is considered fixed and consistent in nature, Ricoeur’s narrative identity views identity as self-interpretation and stresses “self-hood” over “sameness” within its potential for change. “It is through our own narratives that we principally construct a version of ourselves in the world, and it is through its narrative that a culture provides models of identity and agency to its members” (Bruner, 1996, p. xiv). According to Bruner (2004), our narratives are a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation of our experience. In this sense, identity is a self-constructive entity and should be studied as such.

It is through stories that people create coherence of meaning in life; identity is thus people’s stories to live by (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). As Husserl suggested (in Keybe, 1991), life is linked through a continuous series of temporal pretentions (projections of a future) and retentions (consciousness of the immediate past), which add density and cohesion to the ongoing present. Thus, identity has both the quality of change and continuity, and it connects the past, the present, and the social context into a narrative that makes sense (Josselson, 1996). Ultimately, identity is the result of a personal meaning-making process, and the best way to look into an international students’ identity and its process of transformation is nothing other than sitting down and hearing their stories about their own lives. Authenticity is thus a personal entity, as the ontology is not what actually happened, but the meaning one makes out of their lived experiences and the self-identity constructed based on such an ongoing personal sense-making process.

Kegan (1994) proposes four types of knowing, and the four types of knowing can be understood as four strategies to deal with the complexity of modern life: (1) Absolute knowing, where facts are information that are right or wrong, and knowing is having information; (2) Transitional knowing, where students begin to see uncertainty in some areas of knowing; (3) Independent knowing, which is understanding as relative to the individual; and (4) Contextual knowing, which becomes self-authorship, where students combine various points of view into their own, using their knowledge to test its validity. Transitional knowing, independent knowing, and contextual knowing are important strategies to recommend to international students in interpreting and reinterpreting their life experiences as stories. A narrative approach needs to fully respect the uniqueness of each student’s life experiences, which are under the influence of a unique set of multiple and nuanced contextual factors, such as source country culture, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background, target language proficiency, and prior cross-cultural experiences. A narrative approach should also respect the agency and subjectivity of the individual student in the perception of their life contexts, their chosen course(s) of action, and their future aspirations.

Stories have educative potential for identity development and action (Sarbin, 2004). Human experience is moulded by narratives; the stories we tell shape the way we experience the world (Crities, 1971). “Just as art imitates life […], life imitates art. Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative” (Bruner, 2004, p. 692). For this reason, the exercise of having international students tell and retell their cross-cultural stories contributes to their transformational identity construction/reconstruction. As an epistemological approach, narratology best suits that complex, open, and fluid nature of international student identity construction and transformation. International students’ cross-cultural identity is a result of their constant reflections on their cross-cultural experiences as stories. And yet narrative identity is an identity with perpetual disequilibrium (Osberg, 2005), and thus, in helping students develop a narrative cross-cultural identity through reflection, we will need to prepare them for a perpetual state of discomfort.

Encouraging a perpetual optimal distance: The pedagogy

Successful reconfiguration of international student identity requires the successful management of diverse issues— surrounding language learning, social interaction, personal development, and academic outcomes—and the availability of differentiated and timely support in the process (Gu et al., 2010). Guidance in identity evolution management should be an important part of educators’ job to mediate the international education journey. What advice from the educators would be most beneficial in relation to international students’ identity negotiation and reconstruction? As students are open systems—fluid and evolving with open-ended outcomes—what educators can do is build an encouraging, warm, and interactive learning environment, rich in learning resources and support—an environment referred to by Osberg (2005) as “a space of emergence.” In this sense, educators need to participate in and contribute to the shaping of students’ narrative identity in an extremely flexible and responsive way, in accordance with the current moment and current space; teaching and learning are products of the emerging situation. In other words, education should be seen as generative (Jorg, 2011). Each student in this space of radical contingency is a completely unique and singular individual, and the educators’ job is to give support to the emergence of individual identities of their own choosing (Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Osberg, 2005). Educators should strive to create opportunities/spaces for students to see the potential of their learning within the complex and open systems in which they exist.

Earlier language learning research has shown that when learners perceive themselves to be too close or too distant from either their home country culture or host country culture, they tend to be poor language learners (Acton, 1979), and when language learners are very advanced in their language learning and too assimilated into the target culture, they tend to experience anomie, a feeling of social uncertainty, or even alienation (Lambert, 1967). Liu (2014) describes it as an intercultural identity split. For the above reasons, Brown (1980) believes that there should be an optimal distance that learners keep from the target culture. That is to say, to maximize one’s potential, a student has to stay in an eternal state of discomfort and uncertainty. Feeling uncomfortable is fundamental for improving performance, enhancing creativity, and deepening learning (Dennis, 2022). One does not learn much in a comfort zone. One also stops learning when they settle into a new comfort zone. Patterns in complex systems emerge, change, and re-emerge constantly. If one wants to embrace complexity and maximize learning opportunities, they need to acquire the skills of an action researcher, constantly collecting evidence, reflecting on actions, and revising the course of action. This is not to say that international students are doomed to live in cultural limbo. Instead, what is stressed here is that educators should encourage a balanced bilingual, bicultural identity—an identity that retains one’s home culture while acquiring the new language and culture. Such an additive identity, which includes newly-acquired cross-lingual and cross-cultural competences, empowers learners with the desired fluidity to survive and thrive in both cultures and in-between.

Embracing an additive, fluid identity allows international students to move between different cultural spaces and not be stuck in any one. It offers the freedom and competence to function in their home culture, their host culture, and any “Third Space” hybrid culture (Bhabha, 2004) between the two. The acquisition of such cross-cultural competence within an additive, fluid identity makes an individual’s international education experience a truly liberating, empowering, and transformative one. In essence, the educational goal of identity reconstruction for international students is not to settle into a new, secure, and comfortable self. Research in Applied Linguistics has shown that there is no end state in second language learning and becoming too comfortable with the target language results in language acquisition fossilization (see Ellis, 1994). Similarly, there should be no end state in second cultural learning, and becoming too comfortable within the host culture likely results in a cultural learning plateau. International students should be made aware of this and be encouraged to benefit from such a perpetual state of discomfort and tension. To maximize the learning outcome of cross-cultural experiences for international students, we, as educators, must recognize the open, emergent, fluid, additive and, most of all, narrative nature of their cultural identity, and we must create space and encourage students to constantly reflect on their evolving experiences as new stories to live by. Helping them get comfortable is not an ideal goal.

Altruistic care in pragmatic identity expression: The ethical consideration

One’s behaviour is not informed by one singular identity alone, but by multiple identities intersected (e.g., Jones, 1997). We all possess multifaceted personalities, and we reveal different facets, depending on the context (Goffman, 1990). As discussed above, the desired goal for cross-cultural identity (re-)construction is not one singular assimilated identity, but additive intersectional identities that are emergent and fluid. According to Holliday et al. (2004), culture should be viewed as a resource, and multicultural individuals can selectively draw on a collection of symbols and behaviours in order to achieve a particular purpose in a particular setting, like playing a pack of different identity cards to manage their impression on different interlocutors. In a similar fashion, Molinsky (2013) believes that one needs to develop competence in “cross-cultural code switching,” the ability to modify behaviour in specific situations to accommodate varying cultural norms. By learning to “switch” behaviours, they can adapt more successfully to another country’s value system in international business endeavours.

According to the above liberal and pragmatic view, international students’ narrative identity can be expressed through multiple selves, pragmatically foregrounded as social capital when interacting with different interlocutors in different social and cultural contexts. That is to say, one of an individual’s multiple cultural identities may become salient in a response to a given cultural context. But this may create an ethical dilemma. Molinsky (2013) points out that one may experience the authenticity challenge while adapting behaviour across cultures, including anxiety, distress, and even guilt as a result of the disingenuous feeling that the new behaviour is in conflict with their internalized system of cultural values and beliefs. How does one stay true to themself when engaged in behavioural code switching in order to navigate the “culture map” (Meyer, 2014)? Does such pragmatism threaten one’s ethical integrity? What are the rules of this card game of identity (Holliday et al, 2004), as all card games need to follow rules? Noddings (1984) believes that care should be the foundation for ethical decision making in education. According to Ricoeur (1998), care is the most important driving force in the formation of narrative identity. Thus, the pragmatic fluidity of narrative identities should be employed with utmost altruistic care. The ethics of care should be the foundation of international students’ pragmatic identity expression.

Why should we care for others? Do we have the duty and obligation to care for others? There have been many philosophical discussions on the rationale for the ethical practice of care. Based on Goodin’s (1985) vulnerability theory, we have moral obligations to help fellow strangers in the same way we would our family and friends, as they are just as vulnerable to our actions. Baier’s (1985) dependency theory suggests that the normative grounds of care ethics come from the fact that we have been, are, and will be dependent on others, and thus we have the duty to care. Baier’s (1997) fairness principle posits that all of us have the responsibility to contribute our fair share to the maintenance of a cooperative society that we all benefit from. According to Gewirth’s (1978) generic consistency principle, if we aspire for individual freedom and well-being, we must logically recognize the right of others to freedom and well-being. Engster (2005) synthesized all the above perspectives and proposed the principle of consistent dependency. Since we depend upon the caring of others to sustain not only our own lives but also human life, we must logically recognize the rights of others to care and endeavour to provide it.

In Durkheim’s (1947) concept of Organic Solidarity, social bonds function in two ways: either through a valuing of difference, or through a valuing of similarity. Organic solidarity is based upon the valuing of difference, believing in the power of difference and the empowerment of altruism. We only have power in concert with others. As we regulate ourselves, others give us more freedom, thereby allowing us to take on greater responsibility. Thus, the valuing of difference and the altruist empowerment of others should be instilled in students as an ethical bottomline of self-regulatory behaviour in their strategic expression of a fluid identity. According to Ricoeur (1998), it is through caring for self as well as for others that people realize their imagined potential and good life. Through organic solidarity, the students’ aspiration for self personal improvement and the societal need for good global citizenship are united and achieved together. Altruistic care should be the base line and the fundamental principle in international students’ pragmatic use of their multicultural competences and identities.

What is the role of educators in fostering a sense of altruistic care in international students? The goal would be to have them uphold the moral standard of utmost altruist care for others when pragmatically playing their multiple identity cards and refrain from purposeful deception or manipulation. In other words, the ethic of care should be part of their narrative identity constructed so as to help bring a psychological and ethical peace to the multiple selves. Ethical internationalization in higher education should not simply capitalize on the opportunities of worldwide student mobility brought by the globalized world; instead it should take the responsibility to resist the ill effects of neoliberalism by constructing a truly fair and sensible international community in the world and by educating truly globally aware and globally responsible students as future global citizens. Social justice and equality is the most fundamental principle in global education in the sense that the betterment of our lives should not come at the price of others’ worsening (Wringe, 1999). It is the educators’ responsibility to help students develop the knowledge, values, attitudes and skills to aspire and fight for a better and more equitable world for everyone (Ibrahim, 2005). An ethical connection evolves as they come to reflect upon how others are implicated by their actions and how others are a part of their narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1998). In this context, the self becomes self-organizing and at the same time connected to the world. Care for others, in addition to self-care, should be scaffolded into students’ narrative construction of their cross-cultural identity.

Conclusion

Personal change and perspective transformation are key components of international students’ intercultural experiences. Conceptualizing the development of international student identity construction within a finite number of options and directions fails to credit the complexity of the phenomenon and the agency students have in life choices. Thus, international student identity is best taken as a complex open system that is fluid and narrative in nature. Only when an international student’s identity is perceived as a fluid open process can educators recognize their potential to imagine a better life, a desired cultural self, and a transformative cross-cultural learning experience. In a multicultural social context, a student is given the agency and thus has to take the responsibility for her own identity transformation and reconstruction. Complexity Theory is a broader theoretical lens through which to study the identity of international students; it allows recognition of the complexity of cross-cultural learning contexts and the agency that individuals have in negotiating their multiple identities.

Educators can help international students recognize the emerging patterns of self-development in relation to others in the ever-changing world. They can instil in students a willingness and resilience to live in and learn from a perpetual state of discomfort and change in order to maximize their cross-cultural learning experiences. But of course, doing so does not mean that educators shall leave students unsupported, nor shall it create another one-way street of expectations for international students. As was argued above, the educators’ role is to create a generative environment and to contribute to students’ additive identity development. Valuing students’ individuality, educators’ caring engagement in students’ narrative identity reconstruction could offset some degree of the discomfort and messiness of being in a complex world. In coming to know themselves better as intercultural persons, students can become stronger and less uncertain. Educators are also welcome to engage in their own narrative reflections on their experiences working with international students as an approach to professional development (Lin & Liu, 2019). International educators are also an open system, and should consider and be encouraged to constantly reflect on their practices in order to continually learn and grow as devoted, mindful, and caring professionals in international education.

On a larger scale, the transition from Acculturation to Complexity as a theoretical lens in the discussion of international student identity development and transformation should be seen as a purposeful ideological shift in our understanding of the kind of world we hope to live in. Underlying the Acculturation stance is the postcolonialist world structure with a Western centre and non-Western periphery. The Acculturation approach to international student development also serves to encourage and perpetuate the advantages of the centre and the disadvantage of the periphery. As the above analysis demonstrates, the acculturation approach is reductive and unidirectional, and is thus an unhelpful approach both at the personal and societal levels. By applying Complexity Theory to international student identity, we are imagining a different world structure embedded in postmodernist conditions. With the new conditions, international students who move from the non-Western periphery to the Western centre for better-quality higher education opportunities are seen as embarking on the path to becoming, not new members of the elite Western centre, but global citizens with global experience, global awareness, and global competence. Equipped with cross-cultural fluidity and multiple cultural identities, they have the potential to be sensible world leaders with an ethical sense of duty and altruistic care, working to build a fairer and more equitable world. In this sense, international education would not be a process of the diffusion of Western values, but a process of diffusion of universal values of care, justice, freedom, and peace.

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the strong support we received during the peer mentoring process. We appreciate Dr. Alison Crump’s decision to enter the paper into the peer mentoring process; we appreciate Dr. Roswita Dressler’s rigorous mentoring which served to consolidate and refine every idea; we appreciate Ms Lauren Strachan’s strong editing skills and her detail-oriented copy editing which helped strengthen every word, phrase and sentence.

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July 2, 2021July 2, 2021

Student Identity in the Indian University: Language and Educational Stereotypes in Higher Education

Jessica Sujata Chandras, Wake Forest University

Abstract: This article explores how language ideologies and the use of different languages in colleges and universities in Pune, a city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, create ways to categorize and stereotype student identities based on language proficiency, caste, rurality, and religious background. Through ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods of participant observations and interviews at two prestigious Pune higher education institutions, I describe multilingual classroom discourse along with perceptions and reflections on language use. The analysis is as much about identity formation in higher education as it is about the education system’s orientation towards Anglo-centric scholarship in India. In Pune’s higher education, formal recognition of ways Marathi and Hindi assist students in English medium education are largely overlooked and unstandardized. In conclusion, this article demonstrates how multilingual education addresses diversity and inclusion in theory, but in practice, many students confront additional obstacles through language policies that impede their educational aspirations.

Résumé: Cet article explore la manière dont les idéologies linguistiques et l’utilisation de différentes langues dans les collèges et universités de Pune, une ville de l’État du Maharashtra, dans l’ouest de l’Inde, conduisent à la catégorisation et à la stéréotypisation des identités des étudiants en fonction de leurs compétences linguistiques, de leur caste, de leur origine rurale et de leur appartenance religieuse. En m’appuyant sur des méthodes ethnographiques et sociolinguistiques d’observation et d’interview d’étudiants et d’enseignants de deux prestigieuses institutions d’enseignement supérieur de Pune, je décris l’ensemble des discours tels qu’ils se manifestent dans des salles de classe plurilingues ainsi que les perceptions et les réflexions de ces mêmes étudiants et enseignants sur l’usage linguistique. L’analyse porte autant sur la formation identitaire dans les milieux d’enseignement supérieur que sur une orientation du système éducatif en Inde qui privilégie une approche centrée sur l’anglais. Actuellement, dans les milieux d’enseignement supérieur à Pune, la reconnaissance formelle des façons dont le recours au marathi et à l’hindi par certains étudiants dans des institutions de langue anglaise est largement négligée et non standardisée. En conclusion, cet article montre bien que, même si elle aborde en théorie la diversité et l’inclusion, l’éducation plurilingue continue de faire en sorte que de nombreux étudiants sont confrontés à davantage d’obstacles découlant des politiques linguistiques mises en place.

Keywords: identity, language ideology, multilingualism, higher education.

Introduction

This article explores how language ideologies and the use of different languages in higher education classrooms in Pune, the second-largest city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, creates ways to categorize and stereotype student identities based on language proficiency, caste, and socioeconomic backgrounds. I use theories of language ideologies (Gal, 2005; Woolard, 1992; Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994) and identity formation (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Gal & Irvine, 2019; Kroskrity, 2000) to contextualize language use in Indian higher education as critical for the production of linguistic identities. My goal is to illuminate the ways these languages are currently used and associated with student identities. In doing so, this article is as much about identity formation at work, through classroom discourse in higher education, as it is about the higher education systems’ orientation towards Anglo-centric scholarship.

Language In The Indian University

In the current education system in Pune, formal recognition of ways that Marathi and Hindi assist students in English medium higher education, or classroom settings where English is the language of instruction, are largely overlooked and unstandardized. As demonstrated in this article, there is a disconnect in the ways that multilingual education addresses diversity and inclusion in theory but not in practice. Many students confront additional obstacles through language policies that have negative impacts on their ability to succeed academically. The evidence thus suggests a need for formalizing the productive roles of students’ multilingual language practices in college and university classrooms and a recognition of ways the current educational structures categorize and produce stereotypes of student identities.

Historical Context of Language in Education in India

The British colonial period provided fertile ground for English language educational pedagogies due to opportunities for Indians to work and study, providing they could confirm to British ideals in education and occupation. However, during the late colonial period, Mohandas K. Gandhi addressed audiences from 1916-1928 over English linguistic colonization in education. He called for education in vernacular languages stating, “The question of vernaculars as media of instruction is of national importance,” by criticizing how “English educated Indians are the sole custodians of public and patriotic work [and the] neglect of the vernaculars means national suicide” (1922, p. 307). Nevertheless, English remains an important language in the subcontinent and current policies about language.Higher education in India has adapted to contemporary situations and conditions but are no less extensions of a deeply ingrained British colonial educational ethos where the English language remains key (Bhattacharya, 2017; Kachru, 1983; LaDousa, 2010; 2014).

While current trends in English medium education stem from a colonial precedent, liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990s made way for education in English to be part of India’s stake in a competitive global market (Lukose, 2009; Pennycook, 2006; Proctor, 2014). As the state-run university education system grew and more subsets of Indian society had access to higher education, issues around the instructional languages in these institutions grew as well. It is common to hear opinions that an English language higher education provides a linguistic common ground for students across the country and a window to globally positioned scholarship and occupations. Today, English in India is a language of globalization, a lingua franca connecting the country, and an Indian language among other regional languages (Chandras, 2020; Kachru et al., 2009; Pattanayak, 1981). Despite the long history of the English language in India, a great divide in opinion and policy remains over how different languages are used or sanctioned in higher education. The exploration of language in higher education outlined here shows that student identities are pigeonholed along a singular language, while almost all students are multilingual with multifaceted identities and various definitions of academic success. Moreover, this stereotyping along linguistic identities occurs within a hierarchy of languages in higher education and through ideologies held about language and educational success.

Theoretical Framework

Socializing Language Ideologies

In multilingual settings, language indexes various aspects of identities (Schieffelin et al., 1998; Woolard, 1998) and language ideologies play a role in the indexical process (Blommaert, 1999; Lee & Su, 2019). Speakers attribute meaning to languages and individuals, to connect identities to speakers through “language ideologies” which reveal motivations and behavioral organization as a “mediating link between social forms and forms of talk” (Woolard, 1998, p. 3). Additionally, language ideologies reflect politically charged, purposeful, and directed ways of using language as well as representing shared beliefs about language (Blommaert, 1999). Therefore, viewing identity as a social construction and as part of belonging to social groups indicates that individual’s awareness of themselves and their authorship of social contexts and conditions are “contextually situated and ideologically informed” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 605). Identity as located in the social aspects of community belonging indicates that one’s identity is less “a matter of innate characteristics and more […] a process involving socialization in early childhood into socially-constructed ways of being, or learned ‘roles’” (Preece, 2009, p. 28). People hold and act upon these attitudes about languages, or language ideologies, which produce and perpetuate inequalities in society constructed around how language use relates and maps onto other categories of identities (Vivanco, 2018).

Multilingual Classroom Discourse Defining Linguistic Identities

Studies of multilingual classrooms and discourse management explore how language ideologies and language use affects an overall view of students and a construction of student identities (De Costa, 2016; Paris, 2013). A “linguistic identity” then contributes to student identity in how well a student meets the expectations of education as set by the academic institution and, in this case, language is a major factor in academic success (Bartlett, 2007; Bartlett & Garcia, 2011; De Costa, 2016). A structure of success is defined by the institution rather than by students or individual teachers and is a process of standardization of education and educational institutions. The institutional model at these colleges and universities in Pune favors students with high English fluency. Therefore, academic identities of successful students are ones that also claim high English fluency as part of their linguistic identities.

A linguistic identity defines the ways teachers interact and treat students based on their linguistic backgrounds in the higher educational setting (De Costa, 2016; De Kock et al, 2018; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004). While De Kock et al (2018) define linguistic identities as creating cohesive social groups, I extend this notion to explore dissonances of social cohesion in pedagogy that stereotypes student identities. Language ideologies that emerge through discourse in multilingual classrooms define not only the linguistic identities of students but also shape avenues for academic success. Therefore, the following questions guide this analysis: How are classroom interactions in higher education organized around student linguistic identities and what defines student linguistic identities in these interactional spaces?

Methodology

Research Sites

Data for this article comes from ethnographic research through participant interviews and observations in 90-minute, multilingual lectures (Hindi, Marathi, and English) at one state university and one college in Pune, Maharashtra (see Table 1 below). Savitribai Phule Pune University, referred to from here on as Pune University, was established in 1949 and is the city’s largest and most prestigious university. The university has forty-six departments and roughly 14,500 students spread across Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degree programs. Affiliated with Pune University, Fergusson College was founded in 1885. Both a junior and a senior college where students earn Bachelor degrees, Fergusson College has about 4,500 students across 29 disciplines. Like Pune University, Fergusson College is ranked highly for the arts and science education it offers. These two higher education institutions have policies that exams and assignments can be completed in either Marathi or English.

Institution	Pune University	Fergusson College
Hours Observed	Three hours/week for 2016-2017 academic year and two months in 2018	Three hours/week for six months in 2016-2017
Locations Observed	90-minute lectures in Anthropology, English, Sociology, Physics departments	90-minute lectures in Sociology and Political Science departments, Sociology student club, 60-minute club meetings
Interview Sample	25 hours of interviews, six professors and ten students, recruited through snowball sampling with written and verbal informed consent	15 hours of interviews, three professors and five students, recruited through snowball sampling with written and verbal informed consent

Table 1: Data Collected

Data Collected

Participant observations and interviews are the primary data sources for this study. Interviews I conducted and lectures in which I collected observational data required a high level of comprehension, attention, and active participation and took place in both English and Marathi. The native Marathi-speaking students in classes at Pune University who come from rural Maharashtra have low English proficiency as well as some of the students at the university from European and Middle Eastern countries. Indian students from urban centers in Maharashtra and those from outside the state at Fergusson College and Pune University have high levels of English fluency and most have also attended English-medium schools. All the Indian students speak and understand at least a colloquial level of Hindi. Upon arriving at these institutions, students expect their classes to be in English, especially since almost all written material at the university is in English.

Data Analysis Procedures

In terms of data analysis, I searched my observational notes and interview transcripts for topics relating to language ideology and identity, and coded instances in the collection of data where teachers and students classified behavior by belonging to a linguistic community and practices where translation was used and explicitly noted. Then, I organized these results according to teacher interventions and student experiences to define language connected to socioeconomic class and identity assumptions as stereotypes. These categories include instances of language negotiation interactions in classrooms that defined students by their language proficiency levels in English and Marathi and statements about student identities in relation to their linguistic upbringings and educational backgrounds. Based on the coding of my observation notes, I read the interview transcripts for common themes. These included attitudes about students that grouped them according to their linguistic strengths in English or Marathi, and in terms of the linguistic ideologies driving pedagogy and teachers’ interactions with students. Key themes that emerged were teacher interventions, perceptions, and student reflections of the impacts of classroom interactions on language ideologies to define linguistic identities and identity stereotypes by language.

Results

Teachers

Professors across departments at both Fergusson College and Pune University are astutely aware of students’ linguistic and educational backgrounds and use different languages when addressing students with different language backgrounds. Of the nine professors I spoke with across the two schools, all could give me detailed accounts of where each of their students were from, the language medium of their educational backgrounds, and what languages they were most comfortable using. Elaborated below, teachers’ attitudes towards the Marathi-speaking student populations, framed in part to the professor’s language ideologies about Marathi, politicize rural student identities.

Perceptions

Professor Pandhe (all names are pseudonyms), the head of the sociology department at Pune University, explained the classroom as a political space where, “Students who speak Marathi sometimes insist upon using it rather than using it out of necessity.” In her experience, “The village students are very militant about their use of Marathi and how they demand an education in Marathi. They demand to pass just for showing up in Marathi, like they should be treated specially for representing a Marathi-speaking population.” Similarly, another professor in the sociology department, Professor Chanda-Apte, noted that, “Marathi is an identity issue and some students feel targeted because they are rural Maharashtrian,” and went on to explain that in her experience, students may feel that they have been given a bad grade or are asked to work with another student because of their mother tongue.

Interventions

As my interviews with professors revealed instances of changing classroom practices allowing for more inclusive multilingual interaction in classrooms, each professor made allowances for Marathi in different ways. Professor Chanda-Apte explains how she incorporates multilingual educational policies in her teaching:

Depending on their language strengths, some students will ask questions in Marathi and some do so in English. I am often at a loss for how to grade exams and assignments when they are submitted in Marathi and in different levels of English. Students’ low English levels can obscure the fact that they may be uncertain of exam material where the quality of work differs greatly among students who have a strong command of English, the students who do not, and the students who write in Marathi even though most of their materials and sources are in English. As a result, most students attempt exams in English. This offers students a chance to gauge their level of English and some students with poor English also feel that professors will be lenient with their grades and favor their attempt at using English over the quality of their English. Also, due to the differences between Roman and Devanagari scripts used for English and Marathi, it is a challenge to standardize page or word limits on assignments because the scripts drastically change the amount of information that can be provided.

Professor Chanda-Apte detailed to me how she implements multilingual pedagogy in her lectures to motivate and evaluate students’ academic attitudes and performance. Professors feel they must teach in ways that build rapport with groups of students based on their linguistic backgrounds, which signal and index other aspects of their identities such as rurality, caste, and socioeconomic class. Linguistic practices therefore layer and indicate differences between identity categories as connected to politics, histories, and social positions (Gal & Irvine, 2019). Classroom cohesion, therefore, is divided along differentiations among linguistic identities, as also explored by De Kock et al (2018). While rules that allow students to complete exams and assignments in Marathi are intended to make evaluation processes easier for students with limited English skills, it often adds an extra challenge for students to mediate the language of material and the classroom to the language of exams. The efforts to provide access to information in different languages bring into question the purpose of translating materials and lectures into Marathi in the first place as the burden is then put on students to re-translate material into English for their evaluations and for teachers to develop two systems of evaluation.

Another mode of intervention used by professors was to adapt language norms to foster inclusivity. In an interview with sociology students, Mayank, Naina, and their teacher, Professor Majumdar at Fergusson College, explained how their language proficiencies and extracurricular activities are a bridge for the academic success of students who share their Marathi medium educational backgrounds without their added high proficiency in English. The two students organize sociology club events and are both Brahmins from semi-urban Marathi medium schools.

Naina: A year earlier we used to only use English at these events as students thought of them as extensions of lectures.
Professor Majumdar: Soon after, some Marathi-speaking students complained to me saying that they felt excluded and while they could not feel fully comfortable participating in classes due to a language barrier, they did not want to remain excluded from these extracurricular events as well. They felt their classmates who spoke English were also getting extra help and there was no extra help for the Marathi speakers, and they had a good point we had not considered. So I officially relaxed the English-only rule outside of class so that there was a conscious effort to use Marathi and Hindi at these meetings.
Mayank: More students began to come to meetings and participate.

While the purpose of the sociology club meetings at Fergusson College are to elaborate on and debate topics from lectures, participation falls along linguistic lines. These meetings are meant for linguistic inclusivity, the social rules that guide participation reproduce student identities within linguistic categories. Students take it upon themselves to organize extracurricular events outside the classroom such as discussions and film viewings that focus on classroom material.

Since the club is student-led and meetings take place outside classroom hours, students are explicitly encouraged to speak in any language they feel most comfortable using. Some students are extremely comfortable in English and due to learning class material in English or a desire to help improve other students’ English, these students continue a discussion of class topics outside of class in English. However, the club is intended for conversational involvement unlike a classroom lecture so most students use conversational Hindi. Hindi becomes the inclusive language at these events used to bring together the Maharashtrian and non-Maharashtrian Indian students in a more colloquial atmosphere. It is also important to note that all students (excluding foreign exchange students) are expected to know Hindi fluently, so teachers who make accommodations for Marathi to be used in their classrooms do not make similar allowances for Hindi. In these ways, Marathi use along with English is not smoothly integrated into the educational models and classroom discourse at the two prestigious institutions. The process Professor Chanda-Apte and Professor Majumdar describe above, divides students within single classrooms based on language and brings to the surface linguistic identity as the main identifying category for students.

Inadvertent Consequences and New Expectations

Professor Chanda-Apte’s attention to the linguistic abilities of her students created a norm for translation in her classes from English to Marathi. With the intention of all her students comprehending classroom material equally, she once spent an entire class organizing students into groups for presentations based on language proficiencies, to create groups with mixed linguistic abilities. The resulting presentations all started with students using English, followed by the second students who translated the English material into Marathi. The students joked with each other before presentations to, “Get ready to understand nothing but nod your head to pretend like you do!” The constant mixing and changing of languages takes a significant amount of class time and often requires great attention for students not proficient in all three languages to follow the lectures, often resulting in resigned frustration.

Despite Professor Chanda-Apte’s planning, students paid attention to the language that they understood best. The expectation for translation was demonstrated on various occasions. In one example, a student, who previously stated that she never pays attention when the teacher or her classmates speak in Marathi, mimed to me during one of the presentations by nudging the classmate sitting next her and saying, “Translation! Translation!” while snapping her fingers. These attitudes towards the multilingual policies in classrooms map onto an intersection of student identities who speak, or are known by their professors and peers by their linguistic identities, which contribute to language ideologies that index interactions categorizing identities (Blommaert, 1999; Lee & Su, 2019).

Student Reflections

Marathi in higher education is defined in discussions with professors as associated with students from non-Brahmin, low socioeconomic statuses and disadvantaged educational backgrounds, often from rural areas who generally struggle when adjusting to the urban academic culture in Pune. Associating Marathi proficiency with non-Brahmin students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds becomes a powerfully motivating ideology placed upon students who speak better Marathi than English.

Rakhee’s Caste and Urban Social Class

In an interview soon after my interview with Professor Majumdar and her students, I met with Rakhee, an alumna from Fergusson College. Rakhee is Brahmin and she attended a prestigious Marathi school in Pune, so while she has a Marathi medium education, she has a socially privileged urban Brahmin caste background, and a prestigious and comprehensive education similar to the pedagogical rigor she found at Fergusson. When I asked about her participation in college clubs before her graduation she described to me her thoughts on language use:

I remember feeling that those moments are important for me and other students from Marathi medium schools. When explicitly offered by other students and the teachers, I think a space to respond in Marathi makes us feel like we can participate as equals with the content of the discussions in our most comfortable language rather than preoccupying ourselves with what language to use and trying to use a language we are not as comfortable using.

These events reinscribe linguistic identities upon students based on the conscious effort to encourage the use of languages other than English. These extracurricular opportunities become spaces that extend the classroom whereby students fall into linguistically labeled categories, though with more freedom to converse. Rahkee continued in our conversation, detailing her thoughts on transitioning from a Marathi medium school to an English medium college:

I had a difficult transition to the school when I first started my studies at Fergusson. I felt like I did not have a lot of English vocabulary, even though I knew I had strong study skills and could understand concepts in class. But people seemed to give so much importance to English and not to understanding the concepts. When I could use Marathi I made sure to try and show I understood the ideas really well. Even when there is a small Marathi-speaking group, I feel it is necessary that the professor slips into Marathi now and then. Given the class-caste-rural/urban disparity reflected through the linguistic component, I feel that Marathi-speaking students should be treated as a group that needs special attention. So, using Marathi is double-edged.

Such moments create specific spaces for students to speak based on the language they feel most comfortable, while so doing clearly marks them with a Marathi linguistic identity and the assumptions or stereotypes that come along with being non-Brahmin, poor, and educationally disadvantaged. Her urban and caste privilege allowed her to adapt from a Marathi medium education more easily than some of her classmates to the English medium educational norms and structures, such as the use of translations explained earlier.

Balu’s Rural, Non-Brahmin Educational Challenges

Balu, a non-Brahmin sociology student at Fergusson College, is new to English-medium education and comes from an agricultural village east of Pune. He had stopped by the classroom to ask Professor Majumdar a question and joined our interview. The professor had just explained how students who previously study in Marathi choose the English medium stream at Fergusson because they want to learn English and this is the first opportunity for them to do so. Balu, being one of these students, explained the pressure he felt to learn English:

Balu: I study at least six hours a day to keep up because I am from a rural and Marathi-speaking background but I wanted to study in English. My whole first year [the level of] my English was so low. I was going to pay for a spoken English class. Instead, my friends helped me improve my English.
Professor Majumdar: These classes are exorbitantly priced and offered through many private institutions around the college here. They are intended for students like Balu who struggle with their English curricula.
Naina: Just a week before, I edited and made Balu re-write a Sociology paper about twelve times! I did it to help improve his English writing.

In this conversation about revisions, the focus was entirely on producing an essay in English, regardless of how well Balu grasped the content or could communicate it in Marathi. It was more an evaluation on English proficiency than about an understanding of sociological concepts. While Balu was getting help through the kindness of his classmates and professors, his language abilities were an insurmountable hindrance that was compounded with financial challenges, family obligations, and employment insecurity in his hometown. Balu left this program of study before completing his degree at the end of the 2017 academic year.

Vinay Resists a Rural, Non-Brahmin, Linguistic Identity

Vinay is a recent graduate of the Environmental Science MS degree program at Pune University. He was a strong student and top of his classes throughout his schooling in his rural hometown in central Maharashtra, until he began higher education. Like Balu, Vinay’s caste is non-Brahmin, he is also from a rural Maharashtrian background, and dropped out of his course of study and went home after his first year largely due to language pressures. Vinay recalled his emotional distress while making the decision to drop out of his classes:

I cried on the phone with my father after my first semester. In my classes students spoke Hindi and Marathi with each other but in my degree, the professor and materials were too challenging (in English). The only future I could see for myself was to return home to begin a career as a farmer like my father when I saw I failed three out of my four classes in my first semester, something I had never done before! It was too difficult to keep up in classes that were already conceptually challenging with the added pressure to use only English. In my hometown, Marathi is so prevalent that I also had to learn Hindi as an adult. The mix of English, Marathi, and Hindi in my classes at Pune University, and moving away from home with other social pressures were overwhelming!

Unlike Balu, Vinay eventually returned and completed his degree but not without securing support for learning English through friends and classmates. These efforts are ones Vinay decided to take on his own to ensure he improved his English. He, like many students, undertakes actions that go above and beyond the assistance provided institutionally, to not only learn English, but also to succeed educationally. Vinay’s improvement in English ultimately facilitated his educational success and completion of his degree. Vinay and Balu represent only two of the many students who are marginalized by their rural and non-Brahmin identities, which becomes a synonym for Marathi-speaking in higher education. This is due in part to the reserved admission spots for students from rural schools that make rural students’ identities more visible and politicized. This mix of rural and urban student backgrounds is unique to higher education in Pune as the city is a large hub for higher education in Maharashtra.

Mina’s Social Class Background

Mina is a Sociology Masters student at Pune University who said she has never felt marginalized at the university in Pune due to her Marathi medium background nor her non-Brahmin caste. She made friends easily with the foreign students and spoke English exclusively in class. Unlike Balu and Vinay, she attended schools in the urban center of Mumbai, about 300 kilometers west of Pune. She explained her transition to English medium education:

I think it was that my urban, middle-class upbringing prepared me to move to Pune for university. It is not too different from Mumbai. In terms of language, mixing languages in education is familiar to the style of speaking in many public spaces in Mumbai that I visited as a student anyways. I can speak with everyone, even the foreign students due to the English classes we had in my Marathi schooling. I also watch a lot of English television and films.

Her socialization and upbringing in middle-class urban settings, though non-Brahmin, are key factors that contribute to her comfort level at Pune University. Mina and her teachers do not tie her identity as closely to Marathi, because she grew up in Mumbai and quickly learned to speak English fluently. Although she attended Marathi-medium schools through her educational career until her MA at Pune University, Mina found that she easily adapted to using English for conversing and academics with the non-Marathi speakers in her classes. She is therefore able to position her identity among the English-medium educated students from urban backgrounds, rather than the students who typically identify by their Marathi-medium education from rural areas or non-Brahmin castes. Mina’s position as an English-speaking student allowed her more access to resources and cultural capital in her education and the more she used English over Marathi, the more she became identified based on her English-speaking ability and association to other students with English-speaking linguistic identities.

Unintended Consequences of Multilingual Practices

It becomes clear that students engage with material differently in different languages. In one example from a sociology club meeting with about fifteen students in attendance, students had taken turns presenting their views on a debate topic in English. Finally, the student leader during that meeting paused and said, in Marathi, “Now let’s hear from the Marathi students” who were all sitting to one side as a group, granting them space to speak based on language proficiency. The group of four Marathi students sat quietly, listening to the other students speak some Hindi and English, with no intention of contributing to the discussion prior to the student leader calling upon them to participate. When explicitly told to contribute to the discussion based on their language background, which had become their linguistic identities in class, two students provided their opinions on the topic in Marathi. Linguistic identities are therefore internalized by students as well. Statements from students and alumni who participated in this study show an acknowledgement that their student identities solidify around language use in educational interactions such as this one, which in turn affects the course of their studies.

Discussion

Language ideologies reflect politically charged, purposeful, and directed ways of using language, as well, as representing shared beliefs about language. In the examples provided above, language ideologies about Marathi shape professors’ views of students and their students’ identities.

Impact on Language Practices on Linguistic Identity

Key statements from interviews with teachers reveal how teachers structure class activities to balance the language strengths of students in addition to their overall thoughts and attitudes towards students with stronger Marathi language proficiency than English. In classrooms, teachers unofficially divide students into two categories based on their educational linguistic backgrounds: Marathi or English speakers. Analyzing language ideologies provides a key method of linking these micro-level observations of practices to macro-level systems and doing this allows for stronger consideration of political economic structures, power, social inequality, and constraints on language behavior (Woolard, 1998). Marathi speakers are assumed to be from rural, educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, which in turn reinforces Marathi use in classrooms to be conflated with educationally disadvantaged student identities. English, therefore, is associated with educational advancement (De Costa, 2016; Paris, 2013).

The examples here show how language ideologies are created and perpetuated around the use of Marathi, English, and Hindi in higher education classrooms. In addition, this study shows how these ideologies play into identity construction on behalf of professors ascribing identities onto students (De Costa, 2016). Some non-Marathi speaking students showed a resigned frustration, as evidenced by student comments indicating an attitude of derision for the need to accommodate multiple languages in the classroom.

The structure of the multilingual educational policy alienates students and socializes translation rather than normalizing multilingual comprehension (Bartlett, 2007; Bartlett & Garcia, 2011). The non-Marathi speakers interpret the regular and expected translations from English into Marathi as an accommodation for Marathi-speakings students which squanders valuable class time. However, this can be juxtaposed with Marathi-speakers who disengage from the English portion of lectures and presentations as well. Studies have shown students attend to ways different languages signal different functions in classroom discourse (Probyn, 2009; Proctor, 2014). Therefore not all of the Marathi-speaking students remain attentive throughout English instruction, which is always the first language used in formal lectures and presentations. Only some of the students with limited English and strong Marathi attend to the English used in class due to socialization to English instruction or personal interest. However, the students without Marathi fluency do not approach the Marathi portions of lecture or presentations in the same way as a means to learn Marathi. The effect is that there appears to be two classes held simultaneously based on language— one in English and one in Marathi.

Linguistic Identities and Learner Experiences

Students coming to universities in Pune from rural backgrounds are often assumed to have an education that inadequately prepares them for the rigor of urban higher education. This persists as a stereotype of rural education and a pressure of liberalization and globalization in India (Kachru et al., 2009; Lukose, 2009; Proctor, 2014). A linguistically inclusive approach presents comprehension challenges to all students, requiring professors to identify students’ needs based on their language proficiencies, so they can teach towards students’ strengths for greater equality of information dissemination. Students’ attitudes and interactions show that during Marathi instruction, students comfortably fluent in English disengage. The result is often a stereotype conflating students from Marathi medium educational backgrounds with socioeconomic, non-Brahmin caste forms, and educational disadvantage (Pattanayak, 1981; Proctor, 2014). In multilingual settings where values are attributed to speakers’ different linguistic strengths, languages index inequalities between identity categories (Schieffelin et al., 1998; Woolard, 1998).

This study showed that teachers negotiate language strengths in the classroom, and how student identities become categorized based on dichotomies of urban versus rural, Brahmin versus non-Brahmin caste, and Marathi-speaking backgrounds. The three non-Brahmin students included in this study present a dynamic sample set of Marathi speaking student identities in higher education. Where Balu and Vinay are both from non-Brahmin rural backgrounds, they faced challenges in their abilities to adapt to the medium of English in higher education in an urban setting. The attitude about access, exposure, and socioeconomic status related to English relates to LaDousa’s (2010) and Lukose’s (2009) studies where rural backgrounds are often conflated with regional languages and relative rural poverty. The intersection of rurality and socioeconomic class contextually situated in urban higher education institutions produces and perpetuates the language ideology attached to Marathi-speaking students in these settings (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). These connotations display an ideology of Marathi as a sort of deficiency or disability where speakers need special attention from a professor who can use the language when they feel a need to do so (Bartlett & Garcia, 2011).

Student attitudes of respecting allowances made for Marathi and students who prefer to speak Marathi in classrooms, demonstrates that higher education is not only for higher degrees and specialization, but for students like Balu and Vinay, it was the first time in their educational careers where they branched out of familiar settings— socially and linguistically. Mina found that it was a time to shape her identity along English medium educational forms, and she did this through aligning herself with the English-speaking foreign students and by using only English in her classes and assignments to excel in her studies (Bartlett, 2007). Coming from Mumbai, the large, urban state capital, Mina never faced the difficulties that Vinay and Balu faced as students from rural backgrounds. Her socioeconomic class from an urban setting intersected differently with her Marathi educational background. She effectively distanced herself from her Marathi medium background and differentiated herself from her classmates from rural backgrounds who speak primarily Marathi in class. Semi-urban and urban, Brahmin, Marathi-speaking students like Naina and Rakhee at Fergusson College, express that for higher education to be more inclusive and egalitarian, it should be necessary and accepted to appreciate and use Marathi in higher education. Although teachers and students in various departments in the two higher educational institutions know that they are to only use English, they “smuggle the vernacular into the classroom,” as there are institutional and ideological barriers to allowing for complete English medium classrooms (Probyn, 2009).

Implications

This study explores language ideologies based on language use in relation to pedagogy, identities, and power-structures in education. Ideologies surrounding Marathi in higher education organize students into hierarchical categories based on who the education works best for— those who can speak English as an academic and global language, and those who speak Marathi who need linguistic concessions to be made for their inclusion and participation in higher education. On top of the social adjustment students make from secondary school to colleges and universities, English is seen to be an academic language necessary for success in higher education. Students who can conform to expected and accepted academic speech styles are then viewed as good and successful students. The structure of education set up by Maharashtra’s higher education system, and the informal roles Hindi, Marathi, and English play within the system, assign meanings to the languages and the assumptions tied to those languages, labeling students based on their language proficiencies. Since university students pay attention to moments when the professor speaks different languages or translates parts of the lectures, as a sign that the professor is speaking either to them or to another linguistic group, students and teachers have internalized which language applies to them, which shapes or pigeonholes student identities.

Having multilingual structures and well-intention teachers as educational policy is not enough. Inclusive language strategies benefit some students who are able to conform their identities in ways that intersect through class, caste, and language to the institutionalized spaces for Marathi in an English medium higher education system. Impacts of social class and caste as mediators of multilingualism in higher education categorizes student linguistic identities monolinguistically where a “Marathi” identity is stereotyped as a Hindu, rural, non-Brahmin, and educationally disenfranchised. This takes into consideration that the socially stratified caste systems in India place Brahmins at a position of privilege within education and other social spheres. Therefore, implementing multilingual policies for diversity and inclusion of educationally and linguistically marginalized students are more complicated when viewed in practice. Language becomes a contentious divider marking students based on caste and opportunities, facilitated through urban, middle-class backgrounds when teachers identify and categorize students by linguistic abilities and teach towards those abilities. Teachers need to be aware of how their perceptions of student linguistic identities affect pedagogy that impacts various groups of students differently, and be more critical of the power-structures aligned with intersections of identity categories that shape the backgrounds of their students.

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May 24, 2020May 24, 2020

“First they Americanize you and then they throw you out”: A LangCrit Analysis of Language and Citizen Identity

MARINKA SWIFT, University of California, Davis

ABSTRACT.

While the United States (U.S.) has the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, second only to Mexico, an essentialized ideology persists of what it sounds like to be an American citizen, which impacts some speakers in distinctive ways. Generation 1.5 adults who have been repatriated to Mexico are uniquely impacted by this language ideology and the power structures that sustain it. The present study analyzes digital stories of deportation as spaces through which generation 1.5 adults perform citizen identity. Data for the present study is drawn from digital testimonies and are part of a larger archive of the Humanizing Deportation project. Guided by Critical Language and Race Theory (Crump, 2014b), this study aims to better understand the interaction between language and citizen identity for generation 1.5 adults. While scholarship around language and social identity has received much attention across a range of disciplines over the past few decades, little research has investigated the linguistic and citizen identities of adults repatriated to Mexico by the United States. I offer an analysis of the role of language in citizen identities and the implications of these findings for future research and activism.

RÉSUMÉ.

Tandis que les États-Unis comptent la deuxième plus grande population hispanophone au monde, tout juste après le Mexique, une idéologie simpliste persiste quant à ce que cela laisse entendre d’être un citoyen américain, ce qui influence les locuteurs de différentes façons. Les adultes de la génération 1,5 ayant été rapatriés au Mexique sont particulièrement affectés par cette idéologie langagière et les structures de pouvoir qui la maintiennent. La présente étude analyse des histoires numériques de déportation comme moyens à travers lesquels des adultes de la génération 1,5 se forgent une identité citoyenne. Les données de la présente recherche sont tirées de témoignages numériques et prennent part à des archives plus vastes du projet Humaniser la déportation. Guidée par la théorie critique sur la langue et la race (Critical Language and Race Theory; Crump, 2014b), cette recherche vise à mieux comprendre les interactions entre la langue et l’identité citoyenne chez les adultes de la génération 1,5. Alors que l’érudition quant aux langues et à l’identité sociale a retenu l’attention de diverses disciplines dans les dernières décennies, peu de recherches se sont intéressées à l’identité linguistique et citoyenne d’adultes rapatriés au Mexique par les États-Unis. Une analyse est offerte sur le rôle de la langue dans l’identité citoyenne ainsi que sur les implications de ces conclusions pour les recherches futures et l’activisme.

Keywords: language, migration, identity, LangCrit.

INTRODUCTION

While the United States (U.S.) boasts the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, second only to Mexico (Burgen, 2015; Spanish Language Domains, 2014), an essentialized ideology persists of what it sounds like to be an American citizen, which impacts some speakers in distinctive ways. Generation 1.5 adults who have been repatriated to Mexico are uniquely impacted by this language ideology and the power structures that sustain it (such as educational agencies and governing bodies). The term ‘generation 1.5’ refers to individuals that immigrate to a new country before or during their teenage years. The label ‘1.5’ refers to the fact that often such individuals bring with them characteristics of their country of origin, though they also assimilate and adopt characteristics of their new country. Some of the authors we meet in the present study were, in fact, lawful permanent residents at the time of their removal from the U.S., while others were undocumented. The present study analyzes digital stories of deportation as spaces through which generation 1.5 adults perform citizen identity. Guided by Critical Language and Race Theory (Crump, 2014b), this study aims to better understand the interaction between language and citizen identity for generation 1.5 adults. While scholarship around language and social identity has received much attention across a range of disciplines over the past few decades, little (if any) research has investigated the linguistic and citizen identities of adults repatriated to Mexico by the United States. In the following sections, I will provide a brief history of forced repatriation, an explanation of the theoretical framework guiding the present analysis, and a summary of pertinent previous research on issues relating to language, identity, and translanguaging. I then offer an analysis of the role of language in citizen identities and the implications of these findings for future research and activism. Throughout the paper, I refer to the speakers as narrators, authors, and forced-returnees.

How do individuals talk about language in digital stories of deportation? How do speakers identify themselves and their sense of belonging? The present study contributes to scholarship at the intersection of language, identity, race, and citizenship. The analysis shows how essentialized notions of language, as linked to national and citizen identities, impact the linguistic identities of forced-returnee adults both before and after deportation. The present study contributes to scholarship around language and forced migration through a critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1993) of five digital narratives archived as part of the Humanizando la Deportación digital storytelling project (see http://humanizandoladeportacion.ucdavis.edu/en/). The study urges social scientists to further investigate how language contributes to experiences of generation 1.5 adults. Such an understanding is necessary to best support the social and linguistic identities, as well as the linguistic needs of generation 1.5 adults after repatriation. Through such inquiry we can contribute to existing scholarship that acknowledges and challenges essentializing notions of language and national identity, and bring attention to the perceptions and experiences of racialized speakers. There is little research, if any, which addresses the linguistic practices, identities, and experiences of adults deported from the U.S. The present study aims to reduce this gap.

Recent History of Forced Repatriation

According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI, 2015; 2016), of the 207,000 Mexicans repatriated by the United States in 2015, “fifteen percent (29,000) had six years or more of U.S. residence before being deported” (p. 5). It is not clear exactly how many generation 1.5 (gen1.5) adults have been repatriated, nor how many gen1.5 adults reside in the United States. While one estimate claims that about half a million gen1.5s have been repatriated to Mexico over the past decade (Lakhani & Jacobo, 2016), this figure cannot be confirmed with any source. While these figures may bring us closer to a countable representation of gen1.5 forced-returnees, it is evident that additional measures are needed in order to gain clarity about the extent to which repatriation impacts generation 1.5 individuals repatriated to Mexico from the United States.

Another facet of repatriation that complicates our understanding of the situation are the legal categories that determine the deportability of an individual, which are complicated and often not known or understood by gen1.5 individuals who arrive in the U.S. as minors. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there is not an aggregated explanation for the reasons leading to the forced repatriation of gen1.5 returnees. Some gen1.5 individuals are Lawful Permanent Residents at the time of their removal from the U.S., a distinct categorization that is not the same as legal citizen status and is often unclear to gen1.5 individuals. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2018), “Lawful permanent residents (LPRs) are foreign nationals who have been granted the right to reside permanently in the United States.” LPRs are often referred to simply as “immigrants”, but they are also known as “permanent resident aliens” and “green card holders” (Department of Homeland Security, 2018). While LPRs may live and work in the U.S., in order to become legal U.S.citizens they must meet additional eligibility requirements and apply for naturalization. LPRs are eligible for deportation under a variety of circumstances. One way that an individual with LPR status can be eligible for deportation is by committing a “Crime of Moral Turpitude” (CMT), which is only broadly defined by U.S. immigration law. Various offenses may be considered a CMT, ranging from misdemeanors to felonies. In some cases, no actual court conviction needs to be made for an offense to be considered a CMT (Bray, 2019; 8 USC;1227).

The language of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act is broad enough to allow states and local law enforcement agencies to independently interpret the type of infraction that would qualify an LPR for deportation. In this way, even individuals who have lawfully entered the U.S. and have valid legal documentation (such as a “green card” or LPR status) are still eligible for forced-repatriation. In many cases, gen1.5 individuals do not have LPR status and are entirely unaware that their parents (if they immigrated with their parents) did not apply for such legal status on their behalf. For these individuals, learning that they are in fact not legal U.S. citizens and are deportable is shocking news, to say the least.

It should be understood that, while I mention some legal violations that can result in forced repatriation, I am in no way suggesting that gen1.5 returnees have been repatriated as a result of a CMT. Rather, I provide these legal classifications to point out the range of legal codes that may be utilized by U.S. law enforcement to justify the forced-repatriation of individuals. Furthermore, such legal codes are often cited by law enforcement agencies and the Trump Administration as justification for the portrayal of immigrants and forced-returnees as criminals, despite the fact that there is “no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than native-born American citizens” (Ye He Lee, 2015).

Theoretical Framework

Critical Language and Race Theory (LangCrit) lends itself to the examination of how gen1.5 adults do citizen identity through language. The concept of doing language describes the notion that language is a performative tool used by speakers to enact certain expressions of identity. From a LangCrit perspective, identity is fluid and complex rather than fixed. Through an analysis of the identity experiences of multilingual Japanese-Canadian children in Montréal, Alison Crump proposed LangCrit as a lens that identifies and challenges the complex interactions between “audible and visible identities” (Crump, 2014a) because “fixed identity categories do not recognize the acts of identity that individuals perform through language” (Crump, 2014b, p. 208). Crump challenges essentialized notions of belonging which equate language with membership in a one-to-one relationship. Critically, this framework challenges ideas of what it means to sound like and look like someone that “belongs”. LangCrit scholars examine “the ways in which race, racism and racialization intersect with issues of language, belonging, and identity” (p. 207-208); through this critical lens, it is possible to capture the full spectrum of identity possibilities and the expressions of belonging enacted and perceived by speakers.

Power manifests in many ways through policies related to immigration, education, and language. Power also lives in the beliefs that individuals, communities, and societies have about criteria for belonging. According to LangCrit, “power has come to be clustered around certain linguistic resources in certain spaces” (Crump, 2014b, p. 209). In other words, certain spaces and contexts often elicit specific linguistic practices. In these spaces, particular resources are made available in the language or languages associated with social access and power. LangCrit is interested in examining the power in linguistic resources and spaces in order to understand how individuals do language, the values they associate with language, and the identity possibilities that result from the interaction between power and language in space. Existing sociolinguistic scholarship posits that language may, in all its complexity, index identities (Bucholtz & Hall, 2009). In analyzing the interaction between conversational code-switching and social identity, Auer (2003) argued that bilingual speech indexes extralinguistic social categories, referring to categories that are not intrinsically about language. Examples of such extralinguistic social categories might be ethnicity, nationality and citizenship status. More simply, certain ways of speaking are associated with certain identities (or certain ideas of belonging). Sometimes this indexing is imposed onto a speaker and other times a speaker actively engages in particular language practices in order to enact a social identity or to perceive themselves as having a certain identity (Auer, 2003). In this way, language is performative and the identities permitted through language are contrived and dictated by larger social structures rooted in essentialized notions of belonging, related to what an individual sounds like and looks like. Through LangCrit, Crump offers a framework through which to engage these concepts of belonging, language, race, and identity.

As a social practice, language and language ideologies have been studied by many researchers as a function of social identity. Particularly over the past two decades, scholars in the social sciences have approached questions about language ideologies to explore topics such as social identity and bilingual identity (Auer, 2003; Song, 2010; Zentella, 1997), the racialization of language (Leeman, 2004), and power structures rooted in language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2004). The present study explores the use of language in digital narratives as a tool for performing citizen identity, an extralinguistic category, and the implications this has for deportation experiences.

LangCrit views language as a social practice that informs social norms, such as how individuals and groups engage with each other and society. Crump proposed that boundaries around languages have been socially contrived and constructed, produced and maintained (Crump, 2014b). Specifically, “power is clustered around certain linguistic resources in certain spaces” and explores how such language boundaries inform what individuals can and cannot do with language in daily life, as well as the values associated with language use and possible identities (Crump, 2014b, p. 209). Importantly, language boundaries are not language barriers, rather boundaries refer to the socially constructed ways of doing language. The difference being, language boundaries refer to the social norms that dictate what language use is acceptable, whereas language barriers describe the discrepancy in language proficiency between interlocutors (Crump, 2014b citing Hill, 1998). I will elaborate on this concept of language boundaries in my analysis of the digital stories presented. While a linguistic perspective shall not adopt essentialized notions of language and identity, the reality is that many speakers do. Crump reminded us that, “even though languages are social constructions, the ideology of languages as fixed entities still carries a powerful social force” (Crump, 2014b, p. 209), which explains why in the present study we see the ideology of English as a tag for U.S. American belonging and citizen identity, linking a fixed language entity (English) with a nation-state identity (U.S. American).

LangCrit shares much in common with Raciolinguistics, first popularized by Flores and Rosa (2015) and elaborated on by Alim, Rickford, and Ball in their 2016 publication titled Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race. Raciolinguistics focuses on the socially cyclical relationship between race, racialization, and language: language is used to construct race (“languaging race”) and perceptions of race influence how language is used (“racing language”). This framework has been utilized particularly well to better understand how sociolinguistic variation is intertwined with social and political factors. In this way, language may be used to seek or demonstrate (racial) group membership (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016).

Crump explored these questions as well through her research on the linguistic racialization of speakers and the issue of “whiteness as a norm associated with native English speakers” (2014b, p. 207). LangCrit asserts that different physical and social spaces interact with racialized discourses impacting how speakers use language and perform identities. Understanding this power dynamic between normative spaces and language practices, Crump proposed LangCrit as a necessary contribution to critical studies on language.

Both LangCrit and Raciolinguistics acknowledge that linguistic racialization contributes to identity formation and expression, and is perpetuated through power structures. Examples of such power structures are governing bodies, such as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement which seeks to identify and enforce categories of belonging and not belonging. Another example is that of educational institutions, which have historically segregated individuals in the U.S. on the basis of race, language, gender, and religious affiliation. Although LangCrit is the theoretical framework for the present study, it should be clear that Raciolinguistics is also a suitable lens.

Review of Previous Research

In 2012, the Pew Research Center Hispanic Trends published a report titled “When labels don’t fit: Hispanics and their views of identity” claiming that nearly half (47%) of Hispanics in the U.S. do not identify as a “typical American[s]” (Taylor, Hugo Lopez, Martínez, & Velasco, 2012, p. 3). Importantly, the report also claimed the opposite, that 47% of Latinos do identify as “typical[ly] American.” Taken from data collected as part of the 2011 National Survey of Latinos, the report highlighted the range of identity labels used by Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S., as well as their language beliefs and practices. Using data from a telephone survey of 1,220 Latino adults across 50 states, the report found that 21% of Latinos in the U.S. identify themselves as “American” most often, while 51% use their family’s country of origin to describe themselves, and 24% prefer the term “Hispanic” or “Latino.” Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, generation status appeared to influence these identity label preferences in the U.S.; first-generation immigrants born outside the U.S. were less likely than U.S.-born Hispanics to identify as a “typical American.”

The report demonstrates the complexity of “American” identity as experienced by Hispanics and Latinos, as well as the role of language and generation status in identity. Our interpretation of these findings influences how we think about identity as experienced and articulated by Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S. While it may be true that many adults surveyed for the report did not identify as a “typical American,” many do self-identify in this way. Furthermore, the report does not explain what it means to be a “typical American.” From a LangCrit perspective, we cannot essentialize notions of belonging, there is not one look or one sound that qualifies “American” identity. Raciolinguistic identities do not preclude citizen identity, as suggested by the “either-or” model of the report, which offers “American” as a category separate from the categories “Latino” and “Hispanic.” However, Crump also acknowledged the power of such essential notions of identity: “we cannot ignore that fixed categories do exist, problematic as they are. . . they are powerful in shaping an individual’s possibilities for becoming” (2014b, p. 209).

Therefore, LangCrit insists that we identify and challenge such essentializing notions, especially because individuals adopt them as part of their sense of identity. With regards to generation status, the study does not indicate the age of arrival of foreign-born respondents and thus, creates an overgeneralized interpretation of the identifiers used and preferred by first-generation Latino and Hispanic adults in the U.S. From a linguistic standpoint, language acquisition and language attitudes are quite different for young learners than for adult learners. Additionally, the use of English and Spanish tends to differ depending on the generation status of the speaker. This reflects a difference not only in language acquisition across ages but also in language use and ideologies. However, this study does make clear the need to explore further what it means to be “American” for immigrants in the U.S., particularly for gen1.5 adults, and the role of language in “American” identity.

Language and Identity

Language is a social practice through which ideas and beliefs are communicated (Crump, 2014b; Fairclough, 1989). As language is socially and locally constructed, analysis of language use can reveal connections to larger social, political, and historical practices and beliefs about language (Crump, 2014b). Language ideologies can unveil, among other things, how individuals are relegated to either positions of power or subordination within a society. Paul Kroskrity defined language ideologies as “beliefs, or feelings, about languages as used in their social worlds” (Kroskrity, 2004, p. 498). Language and language ideologies have been studied as a function of social and bilingual identity (Zentella, 1997; Song, 2010), the racialization of language (Leeman, 2004), and of power structures (Kroskrity, 2004). Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) asserted that studies in language ideology should demonstrate “a commitment to address the relevance of power relations to the nature of cultural forms and ask how essential meanings about language are socially produced as effective and powerful” (p. 58), and as such should adopt critical ideological analysis with a focus on the political use of language as an instrument of power maintenance. In the narratives analyzed here, power often stems from English as a commodity, tool and resource that grants access to particular services or spaces, or the nationalistic language ideologies that assign language a symbolic feature of self, community, and citizenship (Menard-Warwick, 2013). Therefore, to gain insight into the interaction between language and citizen identity, we must explore the beliefs and feelings that speakers have about language as they relate to their lived experiences around migration and deportation.

Translanguaging

First introduced by Cen Williams in 1994, translanguaging is defined as “an act of bilingual performance, as well as a bilingual pedagogy of bilingual teaching and bilingual learning” (García & Leiva, 2014, p. 199). At its conception, it referred to a pedagogical approach by which students alternated languages in order to develop literacy and writing skills in more than one language. Now, the term has expanded to refer to more fluid language practices and linguistic resources used and acquired by bilingual speakers and writers. From a pedagogical perspective, translanguaging has been theorized and applied as a linguistic resource to foster bilingual students’ full linguistic repertoire, while resisting “the historical and cultural positionings of English monolingualism in the USA” (p. 199). From a social justice standpoint, translanguaging challenges monolingual ideologies for U.S. citizens, as well as a “‘Hispanophone’ ideology that blames U.S. Latinos for speaking ‘Spanglish’” (p. 200). Translanguaging practices of speakers offer insight into the identities associated with language, space, and belonging.

In the present study, translanguaging practices by authors of deportation narratives are analyzed to ascertain how gen1.5 adult forced-returnees perform citizen identity through language. To approach this analysis, I view translanguaging through a LangCrit framework, which recognizes translanguaging as “what languagers (people) are doing [with language]” and acknowledges that speakers negotiate language use in order to navigate the “socially constructed boundaries around languages” (Crump, 2014b, p. 210). The ways in which instances of translanguaging occur through digital narratives are different than in a live conversation between two or more people because the socially constructed boundaries around languages are different online than they are off-line. In digital narratives, translanguaging takes shape through the interaction between Spanish and English accompanied by images that convey meaning and experiences. Speakers negotiate language choice in all interactions with interlocutors. Similarly, through digital narrative, a speaker negotiates ways of belonging and citizen identity through language, revealing a facet of translanguaging and identity.

Discourse Analysis and Digital Stories

While research has analyzed YouTube and other digital platforms in relation to education and participatory culture, there is a serious dearth of related literature that has utilized YouTube in its analysis. Van Zoonen et al. (2010) analyzed YouTube reactions to Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam video Fitna. The aim of their study was to analyze if, and in what ways, the participatory culture of YouTube invited performances of citizenship. The study asked “what kind of selves people produce through uploading their videos” against or in support of Fitna(p. 253). According to the authors, citizenship is embedded in practices and routines and “by doing citizenship one becomes a citizen” (p. 252). A key feature of performing citizenship through a platform such as YouTube is the interaction between a video author and viewer or listener. For van Zoonon et al, the real or imagined audience informs how a speaker perceives their performance as meaningful.

The authors conducted a content analysis of various styles of YouTube videos in response to Fitna to assess if and how video posters assert their performance of citizenship and which audiences they assume. The authors found a range of citizenship performances assumed by the video authors. For example, many videos made in response to Fitna were explicit apologies for Wilders’ video. Speakers in these response videos performed political selves positioning the video authors as citizens with a need to apologize in the name of the Dutch nation state, feeling the Fitna video reflected poorly on their citizenship and nationality. Another type of citizenship performance was analyzed in testimonial style videos, in which video authors make a case for themselves as being different from the Muslims portrayed in Fitna. Testimonial videos, according to the authors, are perfect examples of the performance of an inclusive self that aims to be accepted by an audience. This study demonstrates how digital culture platforms, (such as the Humanizando la Deportación project, discussed in the present study), can foster spaces for performed citizen identity as articulated and performed by the video authors. Furthermore, YouTube videos are described as ‘border-circumventing’ which makes it easier for speakers to participate in citizenship as a performance and practice. These findings indicate the value in exploring language use as citizen performance on social platforms such as YouTube.

Data Collection

Language used to describe immigration and immigrants in the U.S. has led to hostile portrayals of immigrants. Most recently, the current president of the U.S., Donald Trump, has described immigrants as follows:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. (Ye He Lee, 2015 citing Donald Trump, Presidential Announcement Speech, June 16, 2015)

Unfortunately, the example above is only one of many in which the president of the U.S. wrongfully makes a blanket statement that portrays immigrants as criminals. When asked about the comments he made on June 16th, Donald Trump said, “they are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” (July 6, 2015). In reality, the claims made by Donald Trump are not reflected empirically and instead perpetuate xenophobic perceptions of immigrants. In fact, first-generation immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans (Camarota & Vaughan, 2009; Ye Hee Lee, 2015), and despite the lack of evidence for hostile claims like those made by Donald Trump, such rhetoric has perpetuated a racist view of Mexican and Central American immigrants in the U.S., clouding the realities of immigration and deportation.

In the current sociopolitical climate of immigration, activists and research scholars have trended more toward collaboration to create transparent and inclusive conversations about the impacts of deportation. One such collaboration, Humanizando la Deportación, is an online archive of personal digital stories of deportation. Digital storytelling is a narrative genre that pairs recorded audio with visuals (e.g. still images, drawings, clippings, or segments of other video clips) to create a single video or segment of a video (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Lambert, 2013). Digital stories range in length but are generally much shorter than a movie and are often uploaded to social platforms online, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or original website archives. This genre of narrative has enabled storytellers to share their voice with an audience of fellow internet users. In some instances, viewers and listeners can engage with the original storyteller through a social platform’s comment function, though this is not always the case.

For the present study, data is analyzed from five digital stories selected from the larger archive of the Humanizando la Deportación (HLD) project. I participated in this project as a field researcher and video production collaborator during the summer of 2017. The aim of the HLD project is to put a human face to the issue of deportation as experienced by individuals forcefully repatriated to Mexico from the U.S., and to challenge the perception of immigrants and migrants as ‘bad hombres,’ a narrative driven by the U.S. media and President Donald Trump. While deportation rates reached record highs under the Obama Administration (Nowrasteh, 2019), the policies and language used to describe immigrants under the Trump Administration have been uniquely divisive, discriminatory, and hostile. Furthermore, the Obama Administration started the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) in an effort to create a path toward legal citizenship for gen1.5 individuals. The Trump Administration has proposed rescinding the DACA program and has put forth additional legislation to limit immigration into the U.S. The HLD project is a response to the social and political perceptions of immigrants and migration. Through this project, researchers collaborate with forced-returnees in various cities throughout Mexico to produce “cut-and-mix” digital testimonials (van Zoonen et al, 2010). Cut-and-mix videos are defined by van Zoonen et al. (2010, p. 254) as “Self produced video consisting of self made, or existing footage, pictures, images, words and sound, combined into a new ‘text’” (p. 254). A forced-returnee and one or more researchers collaborate to create these videos. The authors decide what images they want to be included in the video, such as family photos with or without identifying information or photos from image databases. The story told in each video is unique to the video author and elicited through open conversation with the researcher(s). My role, as one of the project researchers, was to collaborate with other researchers and the video author. I joined in an open conversation about the author’s experience with deportation and assisted in all aspects of the video production process⁴.

The videos examined here were published between 2017 and 2018 and were chosen for their focus on individuals that could be described as generation 1.5. I chose to focus on gen1.5 individuals because, sometimes, they are unaware that they do not have legal citizen status in the U.S. despite feeling like they belong after spending much, if not most of their lives in the U.S. My initial feelings about the importance of this project arose when I read reports of individuals being repatriated to Mexico who don’t speak Spanish, which highlights a linguistic component of migration and deportation. While my focus is on the relationship between language and citizen identity, I did not choose digital stories based on the language of the author. The videos include audio in Spanish, English, or a mixture of the two. I transcribed the videos at the most basic level and relied on ordinary punctuation. I did not transcribe prosody, body language, or false starts because physical features were often not included (see APPENDIX I for transcription conventions). Additionally, I did not feel that prosody would be a critical component of my analysis since I am mainly concerned with what is said, and not how it is said.

Data Analysis

In addressing the research questions, I coded for instances in which speakers talked about language and tagged topics associated with each mention. I also coded for instances in which speakers talked about ‘citizenship’, which I identified as instances in which the narrator talks about things related to ‘legal’ citizenship, such as documentation, being detained, and the deportation process. To understand the more subjective features of ‘citizen’ and the process of deportation I coded for ‘belonging’, instances in which speakers talk about being in affiliation with certain people, spaces or locations. This, I felt, was an intuitive category to include since forced-returnees experience physical relocation. All analyses are based on the original transcription, not the translation.

For the present analysis, I focus on one of the main themes that emerged from my initial coding: Language and belonging. I analyze the identity descriptors related to citizen identity and belonging, the use of English and Spanish, as well as instances of translanguaging. The analysis that follows highlights how authors of digital deportation narratives signal ideological positions around language and what it means to be a ‘citizen’. I then offer a separate section to discuss the use of translanguaging as a performative tool to convey belonging.

Language and Belonging

One way that gen1.5 forced-returnees convey ideas around what it means to be a citizen is through talking about language in relation to experiences with deportation. In the excerpts below, it becomes evident that the experience of deportation challenges individuals’ notions of their own citizen identity. For Danny, Jorge, and Alex, language figures squarely into feelings and thoughts about belonging. These speakers share the ways that language informs or qualifies what it means to be a citizen in the context of the U.S. and Mexico border.

Danny Juaregui Mariz

First they Americanize you and then they throw you out / Primero te Americanizan y luego te expulsan

Humanizando la Deportación (2017)

Danny Juaregui Mariz arrived in the U.S. at the age of 3 and was repatriated over 40 years later. Danny’s entire narrative is in English, and although he would sometimes speak in Spanish during our collaboration meetings, he preferred to speak in English. Danny built his life in the U.S. and believes that certain abilities and knowledge, like speaking English and knowing about American history, contribute to his sense of belonging in the U.S. As the title of his video states, Danny felt that he was made to be “Americanized” by the U.S. before being forced to repatriate to Mexico. In the first few sentences of his story, Danny says “I’ve been trying to survive over here by just trying to be an honest citizen same as I was over there” (lines 1-3), in which he refers to himself as one who was not only a citizen but an “honest citizen” in the U.S., which he calls “over there.”

1 First they Americanize you and then they throw you out. I got deported two and a half

2 years ago and I’ve been trying to survive over here by just trying to be an honest citizen

3 same as I was over there on the other side. And I’ve been surviving over here ever since

4 with the economy 60 dollars a week, just trying to make a living over here while I try to

5 make my way back. I was born in Guadalajara and at 2 years my father and my mother

6 came for me and they brought me to Tijuana and we crossed to the United States with

7 the visa. I was 3 years old when I crossed over. In east LA I grew up. Went to

8 elementary. My first language was English. It is English. I learned how to be an

9 American, American history, everything that has to do with America. I was there all my

10 life. I did a few mistakes hanging out with the wrong crowd all the time but I was never a

11 criminal. I never shot nobody. I never robbed nobody.

Danny identifies English as his first and dominant language, linking his citizen identity to his language use and knowledge of “how to be an American” (line 12). That Danny felt like a citizen because of his educational and linguistic experiences and was not a criminal challenges the rhetoric tossed around in U.S. media (such as the June 16th, 2015 speech by Donald Trump referenced above) that undocumented individuals are law-breaking, non-English speaking, dangerous, uneducated people. So, while Danny does identify being an American with being a valid and deserving citizen, his ideas about why he is American are reflective of larger societal ideas about what it means to be a U.S. citizen: English speaking, non-criminal, contributing member of society. These learned features of citizen identity are not simply things Danny knows to be true, but they are part of his way of doing citizenship through language and knowledge of being. From a LangCrit perspective, Danny’s experience echoes the notion that “the ideology of language as an entity is tightly intertwined with the doing of language” (Crump, 2014b, p. 210). The idea of language as an “entity” refers to the essentialized ideas of language as something a speaker has and that is linked to national identity.

In the lines below, Danny talks about belonging in the U.S. because his “family’s over there” (line 31) and emphasizes his feelings of belonging in the U.S. by countering with his feelings about not belonging in Tijuana (referred to by English speaking locals as TJ). He is asking the audience to hear his experience and see him as a citizen, as he qualifies his eligibility. He misses his family and feels out of place, forced to live in a different country and city, where many don’t manage to find “a way of life” (line 34).

30 I got thrown out because of the Bill Clinton law and the reason why I came back is

31 my family’s over there, my kids are over there. Because

32 I have no business over here in TJ, I have no business in Mexico.

33 All my friends that got deported, most of them have died or committed suicide because

34 they just can’t find a way of life over here.

35 Me, I’ve just been strong and I’ve been going forward.

To “have no business” implies a situation in which a person does not belong: in a place, doing or saying something. However, having no business does not mean the same thing as having no legal right. When Danny says he has “no business over here in TJ,” he isn’t talking about the legal documentation that he lacks. On the contrary, he does have legal status in Mexico, but he has no business being there, meaning no connection, no reason, and no sense of belonging. Danny speaks to the feeling of belonging as a citizen because of the forty-plus years of his life he had spent in the U.S. and his sense of being “Americanized.”

Jorge

Made a Criminal in America / Hecho un criminal en América

Humanizando la Deportación (2017)

In the following excerpt, we hear Jorge talk about feeling and believing that, in the absence of proficient Spanish, he must live in the U.S. where English dominates and offers a sense of belonging and familiarity. Jorge was 8 months old when he was brought to the U.S. and was repatriated to Mexico at the age of 23. Like many undocumented individuals in the U.S., Jorge was unaware of his documentation status before he turned 19 when he was deported for the first time. In the excerpt below, Jorge shares about his first experience arriving as a forced-returnee in Mexico and the linguistic circumstances that brought him to return to the U.S. despite his undocumented status. Jorge’s entire narrative is in English.

48 I actually tried to enroll in the military but I wasn’t able to because I was deported right

49 before my last meeting or my last appointment with the recruitment officer.

50 I was deported at age 19. I was sent to Mexico. I did not know where I was, what I was

51 doing. I did not really speak Spanish. I spoke really really terrible Spanish and it was

52 mainly slang words that I had picked up in California. So I had no choice but to return

53 back to the United States. I returned five days later.

Jorge felt that because his Spanish was “really really terrible” he could not remain in Mexico. Not knowing the language well prevented him from knowing where he was and what he was doing. He felt lost, in Spanish. So, for Jorge, a sense of belonging is linked to language ability. Belonging also signals a sense of citizenship, because without the ability to speak the local language, Jorge did not feel that he could fully participate in daily life and community. Upon his re-entry into the U.S. Jorge returned to Alabama where he had previously lived, the place he considered home.

Alex Murillo

American Soldiers in Exile / Soldados Americanos en Exilio

Humanizando la Deportación (2017)

Alex, a U.S. Navy veteran, was deported after spending nearly all of his life in the U.S., the country he, like Jorge, identifies as home. Alex identifies as being American in multiple ways, as evidenced by the way he talks about himself and his experiences. In the excerpt below Alex introduces himself as American and talks about feeling exiled from his home.

1 My name is Alex Murillo. I’m a U.S. Navy veteran. I’m from Phoenix, Arizona.

2 I’ve been deported now almost 5 years. I work with Unified U.S. Veterans.

3 We are trying to get back home. I have all my family, my kids – everybody’s in the U.S.

4 I’ve been in the U.S. my whole life.

5 I was taken to the U.S. maybe when I was 1 year old. Started my whole life there.

6 All of my thoughts and memories are that of an American kid.

7 I identify with being an American.

8 It’s not something you can take away from me just by deporting me.

Alex’s video begins with a picture of him in his Navy attire. The image scrolls out and down to give the audience a full view of Alex in his uniform. The next image depicts Alex with fellow veterans before switching to a picture of Alex with his family. These images invite the viewer to first see Alex as a U.S. veteran, which offers a particularly American imagery. In lines 5-8 Alex explicitly says that his “memories are that of an American kid” and feels that “being an American it’s not something you can take away” (line 8). Alex was raised in Phoenix, Arizona and spent his entire life in the U.S., where he attended school before joining the U.S. Navy. For Alex, being a citizen comes with thoughts, memories, and experiences of the world. Alex’s narrative is exclusively in English, a language choice that reflects his citizen identity. Choosing to say, in English, that he identifies as a member of an English dominant speaking country serves to legitimize his citizen identity and his view that language, a medium for thoughts, informs what it means to be a U.S. citizen. Regardless of the physical relocation forced upon him, Alex’s identification as American remains.

Translanguaging

Video authors Zaret and Jesús translanguage throughout their narrative. Using both Spanish and English, paired with visual cues intentionally timed to accompany particular excerpts of their narratives, translanguaging conveys meaning and experiences to the audience. For both Zaret and Jesús language has played key roles in their citizen identity in the U.S. and Mexico, and they address the weight of their linguistic choices.

Zaret

Ni de aquí ni de allá / Not from here, nor from there

Humanizando la Deportación (2018)

Throughout her narrative Zaret switches between Spanish and English, spending a total of 3 minutes speaking in Spanish and about 2 minutes speaking in English. Zaret was not actually deported, though she was forced to repatriate to Mexico when her parents decided to return due to their increased experience with violence against Chicana/o and Latina/o individuals in the U.S. Zaret has much to say about the role of language in her experiences with migration. Zaret’s video opens with a picture of herself as a young girl holding up a stuffed animal, flanked on either side by family members. The excerpt below begins at minute 1:47 and is accompanied by an image depicting the U.S. and Mexico flags blending together (line 21) before transitioning to separate stock images or signs that say “Aqui se habla Español”, immediately followed by a sign in all red letters that reads “English spoken here” (lines 22-23). The image that follows (lines 23-24) depicts a red colored ‘Uncle Sam’ pointing to the viewer with words that read “I want you to speak English” in blue and red letters. All three signs are written exclusively in capital letters, perhaps emphasizing their purpose as warning signs or demands. In this excerpt, Zaret speaks candidly about her experiences transitioning between life in Mexico and the U.S. as a young immigrant. For Zaret, learning English while living in the U.S. was necessary not to be looked at as “weird” (line 23), as an outsider. Around the age of seven, Zaret was removed from school in Mexico and migrated to the U.S. with her parents. As the title of her narrative suggests, Zaret’s experience with migration and deportation made her feel as though she was “ni de aquí ni de allá” (Not from here, nor from there – see APPENDIX II for translation of Zaret’s narrative excerpts).

21 Y siento que lo más fuerte de la transition from Mexico to the states was the language.

22 You walk in Mexico and you speak English, they look at you weird. If you walk in the

23 States and you speak Spanish they look at you weird. So I had to learn English. One way

24 or the other I had to learn so I could communicate in school, outside, friends. If I needed

25 to buy something, if I needed to use the bathroom, if I needed just whatever, I needed to

26 have English, mainly. Spanish was my first language so I did have that one, but obviously

27 when I went to school I was not learning Spanish anymore. So my Spanish start fucking

28 up. It was bad, there were some words that I forgot how to pronounce. I didn’t know how

29 to read well in Spanish. And I think my mom was really smart when she said, “en la casa

30 no hablen en inglés. En la casa yo quiero que sigan hablando en español porque si en

31 dado caso que llegamos a ir a México ustedes tienen que tener el español.”

36 But you can’t be safe. You don’t feel safe. You don’t feel comfortable being in a place

37 where any day you could be arrested and sent to the country where you’re from. So even

38 though my parents had bought a car and we were good in money, there was a lot of

39 inseguridad in the house. Creo que muchos de lo que hemos pasado por situaciones así lo

40 podemos compartir y es algo muy desagradable. El hecho de que tengamos esa

41 inseguridad de ese miedo de que algo va a pasar, y no algo bueno. Si no algo – algo que

42 puede destruir tu familia. Y el hecho de que obviamente también hay bullying en la

43 escuela de que “mira no habla inglés, mira su inglés como es” # muchas cosas que

44 te pueden afectar, no tan solo a los niños si no cualquier persona.

For Zaret, acquiring and using Spanish and English are linked to a desire to avoid being looked at as “weird.” Zaret’s narrative addresses a range of experiences around language that relate to meeting basic needs in the U.S., for example when she says, “If I needed to buy something, if I needed to use the bathroom, if I needed just whatever, I needed to have English, mainly” (lines 24-25). Zaret also talks about the way she has been treated by others in both the U.S. and Mexico in response to her language choices, reflecting that “You walk in Mexico and you speak English, they look at you weird. If you walk in the States and you speak Spanish they look at you weird. So I had to learn English” (lines 22-23). These experiences coalesce to inform particular language ideologies rooted in lived realities: the ‘right’ sound is required to access basic needs and acceptance from local speakers. The power in language, specifically in speaking the ‘right’ language for acceptance, and decent human treatment, is demonstrative as well in Zaret’s reflection on the bullying she experienced as a result of her language. Despite her efforts to be accepted in the U.S. through her use of English, the monolingual ideology present in the majority of U.S. schools compromised her feelings of belonging as well as her sense of safety. While a student in U.S. schools she experienced linguistic discrimination, which Zaret refers to as bullying (lines 42-44) and was forced to prioritize English (lines 26-28). Meanwhile, her mother emphasized the importance of maintaining Spanish in case they ever needed to return to Mexico, where Spanish is the dominant language and is held up by similar monolingual ideologies that index English speakers as “weird” and U.S.-learned Spanish as incorrect or undesirable. For Zaret, the linguistic experiences she describes contribute to her personal ideologies about who she can or should be and where she is permitted to belong as a result of her language use. Her experiences echo the implications of language boundaries, discussed by Crump (2014b), which dictate how speakers such as Zaret are permitted to do language. Zaret, like many immigrants in the U.S., tried to belong in the U.S. and avoid being looked at as “weird” through her use of English. The connection between language, identity, and belonging followed Zaret across the border once repatriated to Mexico.

Jesús

Mi sueño no termina ahí / My dream doesn’t end there

Humanizando la Deportación (2017)

In the following narrative, Jesús addresses issues of citizen identity and paid taxes. I worked with Jesús in the production of his video. The majority of Jesús’s narrative is in Spanish, though he does code-switch in a few instances. In our meetings, we mostly spoke in English, though much time was spent translanguaging between English and Spanish when discussing his narrative and video production. Jesús explicitly requested not to be identified in his narrative, so his face is never shown and he does not provide his last name. He made this decision to protect his family that remains in the U.S. and to practice agency in starting his new life in Tijuana. As a bilingual forced-returnee, Jesús found work in a restaurant in a touristy neighborhood in Tijuana, where he often uses his English skills. After living as a legal resident in the U.S. for most of his life, Jesús shares his concerns about the fate of his paid taxes. He explains the removal of certain civic rights as a demonstration of revoked citizen identity.

43 And another thing I was wondering about, what’s gonna happen with my taxes?

44 I know they’re not for me, so they say, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t want them

45 for me. My kids are American citizens. They’re gonna need the help now that they’re

46 going to start going to college, universities. Where does that money go? Who keeps it?

47 That’s a big question. Personally, I think I lost my rights or I lost all my benefits.

48 But, what about my kids? They’re still U.S. citizens, they deserve that, they deserve

49 to get that money to help them get to college and university.

While the loss of tax benefits creates financial burdens for an individual or family, the symbolism behind the action is disruptive as well because it sends the message that Jesús is no longer welcome to fully participate in society and that his contributions will not benefit his family. In positioning himself in comparison to his children, who are “still U.S. citizens” and “they deserve that, they deserve to get that money to help them get to college and university” (lines 48-49), Jesús suggests that he no longer identifies as a citizen because he was stripped of his benefits. Through this excerpt, we learn much about Jesús’s ideas of what it means to be a citizen. For him, it means not losing civic rights, such as full participation in, and contribution to, the economy. Being a citizen also means speaking English and sounding like an American. To gain legitimacy from viewers and listeners Jesús decided to break from Spanish for this portion of the video in order to be understood fully by his English-speaking audience, who he talked about being American viewers and individuals such as himself, who had identified as American and participated as such. By posing questions in English about his paid taxes in the U.S. Jesús indexes his identity as an English-speaking, tax-paying American citizen, who has been stripped of his rights.

Discussion

The narratives analyzed in the present study reveal particular facets of what it means to be a citizen for gen1.5 forced-returnees. The authors of the digital stories discussed in the previous pages talked about language as a quality that labels one as belonging in a place. For some, English is viewed as a requisite of American identity. Spanish is talked about as a skill that some gen1.5 individuals lack, a deficiency that prevents one from acclimating or belonging in Mexico, as a survival tool in the event of repatriation to Mexico, or as a link to heritage and family. Many gen1.5 adults who have repatriated to Mexico view themselves as Americans. This reality impacts their integration into Mexico, their employment and social life, as well as acclimating to Spanish use. If we listen to the stories shared by Danny, Jésus, Zaret, Jorge, and Alex through the lens of LangCrit, we hear the ideology of languages as “fixed entities” associated with citizen identity (Crump, 2014b, p. 209). From a LangCrit perspective, we step back to acknowledge the role of power structures and social norms (e.g., Donald Trump’s description of immigrants, K-12 English only language policies) on expressions of identity and language ideologies. The videos produced and archived in the HLD project are also uploaded to the project’s YouTube page. Within YouTube, there are power dynamics at work that involve language. The social practice of language informs the interactive component of performing citizenship, resulting in the categorization of who is and is not a citizen. As video collaborators and uploaders of the HLD series, we were aware of the possibility that other YouTube users could, if given the outlet, leave hostile comments and undermine the narrative author’s sense of belonging and citizenship. For this reason, the HLD research team decided to deactivate the comment feature on YouTube.

There are additional limitations to the present study due to the nature of digital data collection. Research that aims to examine digital narratives must come to terms with limitations, such as not knowing the full context of the narrative itself. Additionally, the production process can influence the content of a narrative (Riessman, 2003) and such information is not available to the analyst. The “behind the scenes” language use between the video author and collaborators is not available, we only see a part of the complex role that language plays in the experience and performance of citizen identity. Additionally, the languages used by a collaborator may influence the language use of the narrator. Finally, we can only speculate as to the intended audience that the narrator had in mind when they shared their deportation narrative.

Digital narratives foster a platform through which individuals can express citizen identity through the author-audience interaction. Given that the narratives in the present corpus are archived on YouTube, there is arguably a presumed understanding of the global status of the audience. For van Zoonen et al. (2010) the notion of citizenship can be thought of as connectivity because citizenship as a performance requires interaction between the individual performing citizenship and a viewer or listener that validates the performance. Accordingly, “Their videos thus perform a kind of citizenship, an outreach to strangers as it were, that is based on the desire to present a true picture of oneself to others, and to solve misunderstandings” (van Zoonen et al., 2010, p. 259). The digital narratives of deportation discussed and analyzed in the present study can be described as van Zoonen et al. (2010) would propose above, as a sort of ‘outreach to strangers’, a gesture of testimony that asks the listeners and viewers to understand their story, and to view citizenship through the same lens. Furthermore, citizenship is embedded in the performance itself: “by doing citizenship one becomes a citizen” (p. 252). While the content of the digital narratives discussed here covers a range of themes, what the videos have in common is an assumption about the audience: there is an audience that chooses to hear the speaker’s story. Further analysis of the audience’s role in the language use of deportation narratives needs to be explored.

A gen1.5 narrator’s choice to speak in English throughout their story of deportation emphasizes their status as someone who knows the dominant language of the U.S., as well as knowledge of American culture, including English as the language most associated with school and education in the U.S. The majority of states in the U.S. only offer monolingual English education, a fact that should not be forgotten when considering why children are ‘raised’ speaking English over other languages in the U.S., and likely fosters and reinforces ideologies that place English as a trait that makes one a citizen, as addressed in Zaret’s narrative. Citizen identity as indexed by language could be thought of as a tag that marks a particular social identity (Ochs, 1996). Speakers are actively constructing themselves through language as members in particular social, political, and geographical spaces. Such a tag could be language choice, such as speaking in English, Spanish, or code-switching. How speakers identify themselves matters when structures such as educational institutions and government agencies exist to inform and perpetuate such tags. For many gen1.5 adults like Danny, the experience of citizen identity acquired in the U.S. results in feeling that “first they Americanize you and then they throw you out” (2017). For many gen1.5 adults, doing citizen identity through language is learned and expected in the U.S., and follows them to the other side of the border. The stories discussed in the present study reveal that both language ideologies and practices interact with the mere possibilities of citizen identity formation and maintenance.

Conclusion

The present study offers an initial analysis of the role of language in what it means to be a citizen for generation 1.5 adults forced to repatriate to Mexico by the United States. In order to more thoroughly approach the topics discussed here, future studies should offer macro-level critical discourse analysis, such as content analysis of discourses produced in American and Mexican media, to examine the features of language ideologies that inform understandings of the role of language in citizen identity. The study urges social scientists and activists to be attentive to the ways that language contributes to what it means to belong in certain contexts and spaces, particularly for generation 1.5 adults. Such understanding is necessary to best support the social and linguistic identities, as well as the linguistic needs of generation 1.5 adults after deportation.

Due to the realities experienced by forced-returnees that make physical access to interviews and other methods of data collection difficult, in addition to the social justice movement currently thriving on the web, researchers and social activists should continue to explore language use in digital narratives. Identity, belonging, and language interact with experiences of migration and repatriation for generation 1.5 individuals in unique ways. What can linguists do to disrupt the hostile language ideologies that result in bullying or housing fraud, such as Zaret experienced? The impact of deportation crosses generations, languages, and man-made borders. There are voices to be heard.

Acknowledgements

In addition to Professor Robert Irwin, I would like to thank my fellow researchers and members of the Humanizando la Deportación research team that I worked with in the video collaborations mentioned: Guillermo Alonso Meneses, Danae Valenzuela, Sarah Hart, Lizbeth de la Cruz Santana, Ana Luisa Calvillo, John Guzman, Yesika Ordaz, Yaira Maren, Marlene Mercado, José Israel Ibarra, and Dörte Krebsbach.

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APPENDIX I: Transcription conventions

[…] indicates omitted excerpt or utterance

# incomprehensible utterance

italics denotes a translation

APPENDIX II: Translation of Zaret’s excerpt

21 And I feel like the hardest transition from Mexico to the states was the language

29 And I think my mom was really smart when she said, “at home

30 don’t speak English. At home I want you to continue to speak Spanish because if for

31 some reason we go back to Mexico you need to have Spanish”

39 insecurity in the house. I believe a lot of what we experienced and what

40 we can share is something really unpleasant. The fact that we have that

41 insecurity and that fear that something is going to happen, and not something good. If

42 anything something – something that can destroy your family. The fact that obviously

43 there’s also bullying in school like “look she can’t speak English, listen to her English”

a lot of things that

44 can affect you, and not just kids but any person.

[i] These statistics, while reported by the MPI, use calculations from Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF), “Encuesta sobre migración en la frontera norte de México (EMIF Norte)” accessed by MPI September 2, 2016 www.colef.mx/emif/eng/bases.php; SEGOB “Boletines Estadísticos”, 2005, 2010, and 2015.

May 15, 2018May 17, 2018

Navigating competing identities through stance-taking: A case of Ukrainian teenagers

Volume 2(1): 2018

ELIZABETH PEACOCK, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

ABSTRACT

Scholars of postsocialism have shown how nation and citizenship are shifting along with political and economic borders, and the movement of people across these borders. However, few have examined these transformations through the ways in which individuals take up stances in everyday interactions. Ukraine’s current economic and political difficulties reveal a disconnect between what western Ukrainians feel they deserve and the economic realities that drive them to seek work abroad, which is evident in competing views on migration. This article brings together ethnography and stance theory to examine how teenagers draw upon and engage with a variety of social views to evaluate migration, position themselves and others in relationship to migration, as well as to (dis)align themselves with others in these interactions. The data examined herein come from an informal group discussion held at one public school in a middle-class neighborhood in western Ukraine. The analysis suggests that the stances teenagers take towards Ukrainian migration potentially affect the social identities teenagers construct within their existing peer groups by unintentionally bringing forward socioeconomic class identities that threaten group boundaries based on friendship. In taking up these stances, western Ukrainian teenagers also convey the role migration has in who they are and who they want to be, and reflect the broader views on migration in Ukrainian society.

RÉSUMÉ

Les chercheurs s’intéressant au post-socialisme ont montré comment la nation et la citoyenneté évoluent avec les frontières politiques et économiques, et avec le mouvement des personnes à travers ces frontières. Cependant, peu ont examiné ces transformations en étudiant la façon dont les individus prennent position dans les interactions quotidiennes. Les difficultés économiques et politiques actuelles de l’Ukraine révèlent une déconnexion entre ce que les Ukrainiens de l’Ouest estiment mériter et les réalités économiques qui les poussent à chercher du travail à l’étranger, ce qui est évident dans les opinions divergentes sur les migrations. Dans cet article, je lie l’ethnographie et la théorie des attitudes pour examiner comment les adolescents s’inspirent d’une variété de visions sociales pour évaluer la migration, se positionner eux-mêmes et d’autres en relation avec la migration, et se dissocier des autres dans l’interaction. Les données examinées ici proviennent d’une discussion de groupe informelle tenue dans une école publique d’un quartier de classe moyenne dans l’ouest de l’Ukraine. L’analyse suggère que les attitudes des adolescents vis-à-vis de la migration ukrainienne affectent potentiellement les identités sociales que les adolescents construisent au sein de leurs groupes de pairs existants en introduisant involontairement des identités de classes socio-économiques qui menacent les frontières de groupe basées sur l’amitié. En adoptant ces positions, les adolescents de l’ouest de l’Ukraine expriment également le rôle que la migration joue sur la construction de leur identité et reflètent les perspectives plus larges sur la migration dans la société ukrainienne.

Keywords: identity, stance, youth, migration, Ukraine.

INTRODUCTION: POSTSOCIALIST MIGRATION IN UKRAINE

Since the early 1990s, migration from Ukraine has been the result of poor living conditions (Shamshur & Malinovska, 1994) that stem from larger economic troubles: the collapse of the USSR and changing relations with the former Soviet republics; hyperinflation following its 1991 independence; growing unemployment, as well as political instability and corruption (Sutela, 2012; Wilson, 2013). For example, the GDP per capita of Ukraine fell from $1,490 in 1991, to $636 in 1999, and was hit hard during the 2008-2009 global economic crisis (Wilson, 2013). Continuing political instability is evident in the 2004 Orange Revolution, the 2014 Euromaidan protests, the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, and the ongoing military conflict in the eastern Donbass regions. Though Ukrainians have historically migrated throughout Russia and other former Soviet Republics, and to Western Europe and North America to escape the Soviet regime, the persisting economic and social instability of post-1991 has pushed many more to seek work abroad (Hormel & Southworth, 2006; Solari, 2014; Tolstokorova, 2009; Vollmer & Malynovska, 2016). As a result, Ukraine has become one of the top emigration countries in the world, with approximately 12.3% of its population living abroad in 2013 (Ukraine, 2016). While Russia and the United States were the top receiving countries for Ukrainians in 2013 (Ukraine, 2016), for those living in western regions like L’viv, a major city near the European Union border, migration often means travelling to nearby Poland and other European Union countries, such as the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, and Portugal (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016).

Ukraine’s current economic and political difficulties reveal a disconnect between what western Ukrainians feel they deserve as “Europeans” and the economic realities that drive them to seek work abroad (Montefusco, 2008; Solari, 2010; Tolstokorova, 2009). This disconnect is evident in competing views of migration, which weigh the potential economic advantages against the social disadvantages. On the one hand, migration is viewed by many western Ukrainians as a way to reclaim their pre-Soviet European heritage, through living a “normal” life predicated on achieving a European middle-class lifestyle (Galbraith, 2004; Patico, 2008; Peacock, 2012; 2015; Schulze, 2010). It also gives migrants the opportunity to support their families financially, and to gain the cultural capital that comes with experiencing Europe first-hand (Zhurzhenko, 2010). Remittances, such as providing for a child’s education, help to support those back home and can be the primary support for relatives in rural villages (Dickinson, 2005). In addition, successful migrants can return home with the knowledge and resources to help make their home country “European again.” As Tolstokorova (2009) explains, “Young people with experience of foreign employment have more active positions, higher self-reliance and economic self-sufficiency, and stronger responsibility for their own lives. . . .Furthermore, international experience. . .increases linguistic competence and communication skills, expands cultural horizons and intercultural tolerance” (p.10).

Migration, however, has its downsides. Migrants may find themselves exploited by former co-nationals or locals due to their immigration status, their lack of a social support system, and their inability to speak the local language. While their pay may benefit their families, their status abroad is often that of the underclass, and their absence is often blamed for many of Ukraine’s social problems. This migration puts Ukraine in a bind as it reflects traditional Third World migration patterns (Solari, 2010). The perception that Ukrainian emigrants might come more from a Third World country, rather than a First World one, is evident in some of the risks Ukrainian migrants face, such as human trafficking (Solari, 2010).

There is also fear that migration dissolves the nation, since parents are separated from their children and fewer young adults remain to raise their own families. Though additional economic resources give the children of emigrants valuable social capital, it often comes with a lack of parental attention (Tolstokorova, 2009). Ukrainians who leave to work abroad are often seen as less committed to the nation, as they may never return, and linguistically and culturally assimilate to their host countries of northern and western Europe, Canada, and the United States (cf. Solari, 2014). Those who remain see themselves as having been abandoned, left to solve the country’s problems on their own or to emigrate themselves.

Even the youngest generation in L’viv, who has only known independent Ukraine and has seen the borders of Europe expand to within 60 miles of their home city, is aware of both the potential benefits and risks of migrating to Europe. This generation, even more so than their parents, sees itself as torn between two obligations: the duty to retain their Ukrainian-ness—their language, their culture, their love of the country, on the one hand; and, the expectation to help Ukraine rejoin the rest of the Western world, on the other.

In this article, I examine the stances taken by a group of western Ukrainian teenagers on migration, where a stance is viewed as a type of social action that potentially affects the social identities constructed within their existing peer groups and reflects the broader views on migration in the Ukrainian society. These teenagers draw upon and engage with a variety of social views to evaluate migration, position themselves and others in relationship to migration, and to (dis)align themselves with others in the interaction. They learn particular views about the value of migration from the media, their parents—stories that circulate within their peer and family social networks—and in the attitudes expressed at their schools, such as teachers’ attitudes towards the parents of students who work abroad or in stories that describe migration as the primary source of domestic problems and child neglect. In taking up these stances, western Ukrainian teenagers also convey which of their identities are most salient in the interaction, and the role migration has in who they are and who they want to be.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: STANCE AS SOCIAL ACTION

DuBois (2007) defined stance as “a linguistically articulated form of social action” that is “shaped by the complex interplay of collaborative acts by dialogic co-participants” (p. 139, 142). In order to interpret the meaning of any particular stance, what must be known or inferred from the interaction is the identity of the stance taker, the object of stance-taking, and to what prior stance the stance taker is responding (DuBois, 2007). Stance takers position themselves towards a shared object of the interaction and its context. Such context is important for understanding stance-taking because the positioning of the stance taker, and their alignment to the stances of others, often takes into account existing social relations, the relevant in-the-moment context, and stance taker’s current social identity among their peer groups (Jaffe, 2009; Wortham, 2006). DuBois’ (2007) “stance triangle” emphasizes the process through which speakers perform social acts through stance: as a subject evaluates a shared stance object, they simultaneously position themselves and others, and align themselves with other subjects (p.163). As such, stances can be viewed as “acts of identity” (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) that are co-constructed by participants in response to the stances they take towards the shared stance object and the alignments they make toward each other. As the salient social identities of participants are often in-flux, these “identities-in-interaction” (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998) can play a role in stance-taking and realignment with the stances of others.

More than any other social groups, youth actively engage with processes of identity construction as they distance themselves from their parents, connect to their peers, and otherwise respond to wider social phenomena (Bucholtz, 2002). One way in which they juggle various identities is through the stances they take and the alignments they make with the stances of their peers (Eckert, 1989; Goodwin, 2006). These stances can more clearly reveal the social views and values in wide circulation, as well as illustrate the effects of stance-taking on unfolding interactions. An individual’s stance-taking can be the result of particular social identities, such as class, but can also affect other salient identities, like membership in a particular friendship group.

THE STUDY: IDENTITIES OF THE POSTSOCIALIST GENERATION

The data examined here comes from a larger 16-month research project conducted in L’viv, Ukraine in 2006-2007, which investigated what the first generation of independent Ukraine learned about “being Ukrainian”, and how they were developing a sense of national identity. To these ends, I conducted participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal group discussions with teachers, students, and parents at two neighborhood public secondary schools. The Taras Shevchenko school was located in a working-class neighborhood, comprised of several Soviet-era apartment blocks. Ivan Franko was located in a middle-class neighborhood with detached homes in an area historically associated with L’viv’s intellectual elite.i Between the two schools, I followed three cohorts during their 8th and 9th grade years, attended a variety of classes with them, spent time visiting their homes, and asked them about current events, their uses of language, and their views on what it meant to be Ukrainian. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on the analysis of the data collected during one informal group discussion at Ivan Franko school, which focused on students’ future aspirations, attitudes and experiences with international travel, and what they had heard about Ukrainians living abroad. The audio recording of the discussion was transcribed and translated. Instances of stance-taking (IST) were selected from the session and were examined within the context of the emerging interaction by taking into consideration DuBois’ (2007) “stance triangle”, as well as the ethnographically-informed context of the backgrounds and relations between individual students.

During the project, migration emerged as an important point of discussion among teachers and parents. At Taras Shevchenko, parents’ work abroad was viewed as problematic, one that was often voiced by the students’ homeroom teacher during her public scolding of two boys whose mothers worked in Italy and, in her opinion, their poor grandmothers were hopeless in keeping the boys properly disciplined. According to her, without their mothers at home, the boys were destined to become delinquents. The issue of migration at the middle-class school, on the other hand, was more nuanced. Though some students at Ivan Franko had parents working in lower-income jobs abroad, and so were unable to visit their families on a regular basis, migration was not limited to the working class. Rather, working or being educated abroad had an appeal for those with more financial means; a middle-class teenager, for example, could envision gaining both a college degree and first-hand experience of living in a foreign country.

At both schools, two views of migration were apparent in the stances students took toward the issue of migration. The positive view focused on the financial and personal benefits of going abroad. The negative view centered on the dangers of being a migrant in a foreign land and the neglect of one’s family that it resulted in. This negative view was also found towards other students and their stances, including students who were close friends and those who were merely classmates. As such, not all uses of these two views on the value of migration resulted in disruptions of the existing group boundaries. Rather, participants’ stances at times reinforced these boundaries and at other times challenged them.

THE DATA: EXAMINING THE STANCES

Friendship groups among teenagers in Ukraine often cross class boundaries, as the socialist value of equality among people continues to prevail. In typical interactions, different classroom statuses allow for the most vocal students to disagree with others with little risk to the existing social relationships, which are based on their status in a peer group, class, and shared interests. The instances of stance-taking that follow occurred during a group discussion among one cohort of 8th graders at Ivan Franko, which was attended by nine girls and two boys, and was held in a classroom after school. The most vocal participants were girls who belonged to two different friendship groups. Ksenya and Vika both come from middle-class families, and are part of the “popular” girls’ friendship group. Whereas, Vika comes from the long-standing middle-class intelligentsia in L’viv, Ksenya’s family is part of the emerging “new” middle class. Her father is an independent businessman and her mother is a housewife by choice, not because of any lack of employment opportunities. Her entire family has also traveled abroad, including a family trip to Egypt with the family of another girl at school. Marta and Sofiya are part of another friendship group in the class. Marta is working-class, the daughter of flower sellers who often send her to spend summers with her rural relatives. Sofiya, like Ksenya, is also part of the emerging middle class; her father migrated to the United States and was working there during that time.

In IST 1 below, class differences lead to competing perspectives on the need to migrate in order to obtain gainful employment.

IST 1: Employment opportunities in Ukraine

Marta	ale v Ukrajini lihshi umoby	but it’s ideal conditions in Ukraine
Ksenya	ale v polovyny=	but in the middle=
Nadiya	=na naihirshykh robotakh=	=in the worst work=
Ksenya	=ne znaidesh sobi robota, jakshcho v tebe ne maje, napryklad, vyshchoji osvity, bez vyshchoji osvity nikuda ne berut’, rozumijut’	=you can’t find work for yourself, if you don’t have, for example, a higher education, without a higher education you can’t go anywhere, you know
Marta	Mozhna! [mozhna znaity	You can! [you can find
FSTii	[mozhna znaity, Ksenja, robota shchob	[you can find, Ksenya, work that
Marta	Ksenya, v Ukrajini zara povno roboty, to ne, to shcho p”jat’ rokiv tomu, prosto ljudy vvyjizhdzhajut’ tuda z [Ukrajiny	Ksenya, now in Ukraine there’s full-time work, it’s not like five years ago, it’s just that people migrate there from [Ukraine
Ksenya	[ljudy vvyjizhajut’, tomu shcho vony khochut’ krashchoho [zhyttja	[people migrate because they want a better [life
Vika	[dumaju	[I think

Though migrating abroad is unnecessary according to those like working-class Marta, middle-class Ksenya finds migration to be the best and only choice for those with limited education, as well as a way for the middle class to meet their own financial and education goals. In their attempts to take the floor—evidenced by their supporting peers’ latching and overlapping, and Ksenya’s overlap—Marta’s and Ksenya’s opposing stances reinforce their different class positions and friendship group identities.

When multiple identifications are at play, participants can also maneuver their positions in order to favor one identity over another, such as refining one’s stance to align with the morality of one’s peers rather than other non-peers. Though Ksenya and Sofiya usually occupy different positions in the classroom social order, in IST 2, they find themselves taking a similar stance on the value of living abroad, but give different reasons for doing so.

IST 2: I want to live in Ukraine, but. . .

Marta	a khochu zhyty v Ukrajini ale maty majetok=	I want to live in Ukraine but have an estate=
Sofiya	=a ja tozhe khochu zhtyty v kvartyry ale v Londoni	=and I also want to live in an apartment but in London
Nadiya	v Londoni, duzhe dorohi kvartyry, So[fi	in London, apartments are really expensive, So[fi
Sofiya	[a nu j shi, ale vse odno meni duzhe Anhlija [podobavajet’sja	[so what, it doesn’t matter to me, I really [like England
Nadiya	[tam hodynnyky (rzhavijut’)	[there’s a clock they ( )
Sofiya	meni L’ondon duzhe syl’no podobajet’sja khot’ na p”jat’ khvylyn	for me, London is really grand, I liked it after five minutes
((segment skipped))
Vika	ja ne khochu…a meni podobaju’tsja v Ukrajini	I don’t want to ((go abroad))…I like being in Ukraine
Nadiya	a ja b khotila tak mozhe [na ne vse zhyttja	I would like to, maybe [but not all my life
Ksenya	[ja b khotila pojikhaty za kordon navchatysja, ale ne zhyty	[I would like to go abroad to study, but not to live
Maryna	Ta	yeah
Ksenya	a potim povernulasja	and return after
Nadiya	u v vas taka niby vy zaraz jak vchytesja ale, tak, nu, piznajete svit, nu, mozhete jizdyty tam po svitu	for you now it’s as if you’re like studying but, yeah, well, you get to know the world, well, you can go there all over the world
Vika	a my, sho ne mozhem?	and what about us, we can’t?

While Sofiya favours living in a foreign country due to the more comfortable lifestyle and higher standard of living she could gain there, Ksenya finds the experience of living in another country as a way to improve her life back in Ukraine. Rather than seeking a more comfortable European life and contributing to the country’s growing “brain drain” problem (cf. Solari, 2010), Ksenya’s goal is to get a professional degree at a European university and then return to Ukraine. Though Ksenya agrees with Sofiya that not everything is bad about living abroad, she places more emphasis on her desire to return to Ukraine, framing her desire to emigrate as a particular, demarcated stage in her life, not as the lifetime goal that Sofiya holds. By emphasizing how her stance diverges from Sofiya’s, Ksenya is able to maintain her social distance from Sofiya. Ksenya elaborates in IST 3, where she navigates her similar stance to Sofiya while also managing her disalignment from her close friend, Vika.

IST 3: They want to see something else

Ksenya	chomu za kordon?	why go abroad?
Sofiya	bo za kordonom lipshe, meni zdajet’sja=	because it’s easier abroad it seems to me=
Vika	=ni ni	=no no
Sofiya	tak	yes
FST	ja protestuju	I’m against it
	((dull thud, followed by laughter))
Natalya	tam baksy , baksy zeleni	there’s bucks, green bucks
Ksenya	ni nje tomu shcho khochet’sja pobachyty shos’ inshe nizh v nas ne til’ky nashu Ukrajinu tobto za kordonom vse rivno jakis’ inshi ljudy spilkuvannja inshe	no no because they want to see something different, not only what we have in Ukraine, that is, abroad everything is different, different people and other kinds of interactions

In this way, Ksenya is able to present an identity of a future moral Ukrainian emigrant, one who uses emigration for life improvements and then returns home. By spending time in another country, migrants can experience things that cannot be experienced at home, and can return to Ukraine with greater world experience. In taking this stance, however, Ksenya finds resistance from her friends Vika and Natalya. Vika’s “no” works to reject Sofiya’s claims that life abroad is “easier”, but also foretells her later stance against the value of migration (IST 4). Natalya’s emphasis on seeking money, specifically U.S. dollars (“bucks”), also indirectly resists Ksenya’s claim that migrating leads to deeper changes in the migrants themselves. Though Ksenya is able to negatively align from Sofiya’s position, her strong support of migration reveals possible disalignment from her own friends.

Marta’s and Ksenya’s class identities in IST 1, and Sofiya’s and Ksenya’s class identities in IST 2-3, do not subsume their existing peer group identities. However, a person’s stance-taking can result in the domination of some of identities over others even if the person does not intentionally seek to highlight the dominating identities. Though both Ksenya and Vika belong to the same friendship group, they find themselves taking different stances on whether working abroad is beneficial for Ukrainians. From Ksenya’s perspective, as part of the new middle class, she claims that Ukrainians without a college degree can work as managers and earn more money in Europe than those with degrees in Ukraine. In contrast, Vika comes from a family who is part of city’s long-standing, urban middle class, which values education for itself and which retains social prestige but not necessarily the financial resources equal to that status. As such, Vika challenges Ksenya’s claim saying, “they aren’t managers”, which aligns with Marta’s earlier stance in the discussion (not shown here) that these migrants “abandon their families” when they move abroad to work.

In an effort to explain her view, Vika describes the precarious position of Ukrainian migrants by presenting a narrative about her grandmother’s friend, a woman who found herself in prison in IST 4.

IST 4: Where do you appeal, if you’re not a resident?

Vika	I taka sama Italija, pojikhala mojeji babtsi podruzhka, i sho ty dumajesh? jij zrobyly nepravyl’ni dokumenty, vona v tjurmi cydila prosto tak, prosto tak, piv rokiv bo jiji zrobyla tam nepravyl’ni dokumenty, ne tut, jiji zrobyla nepravyl’ni, a tam, i tak povyna ljudej	And it’s the same in Italy, my grandmother’s friend went, and what do you think? They made her illegal documents, she sat in prison, yeah only, only, yeah for half a year because she had illegal documents with her there, not here, illegal ones made for her there, and- and, yeah, people have to do it
Lana	mozhna ljudy, nu i sho?	people might, so what of it?
Vika	a sho, nu i sho? Ljudyna prosto tak v tjurmi sydila? tomu shcho jiji hospodari zrobyly jij nepravyl’ni dokumenty	and what, so what? people just have to go to jail? because her bosses made illegal documents for her
FST	Vsjaki robljat’ dokumenty	they make all kinds of documents
Vika	a zvidky vona znala sho nepravyl’ni, a tak pobynni ljudej kuda ty zverneshsja, jaksho ty ne mistseva?	and how did she know they were illegal? but people have to. where do you appeal, if you’re not a resident?
Ksenya	dobre, Vika. davai	good, Vika. give us the next one
	((open palm hit on tabletop))	((open palm hit on tabletop))
Nadiya	ty musysh ity v jakes’ posol’stvo, zrobyjaty svoji dokumenty, tobi zh ne hospodari tuda idut’ vyrobljaty jikh?	you have to go to some kind of embassy, to get your own documents, not have the boss there go and do them for you?
Vika	tak, vizu to vsë tak, ale shob vona maje dokumenty [sho vona tam mozhe perebuvaty	yeah, all visas are like that, but if she has documents [that she can look over there
Sofiya	[ale vona mozhe pereviryty=	[but she can verify them=
Nadiya	=Vika, vona mozhna pereviryty, khto znaje ukrajins’ku movu, khto pratsjuje, i pereviryty documenty	=Vika, she can verify them, someone knows Ukrainian, someone works there, and verify the documents
Ksenya	davaite tak, skil’ky poluchaje nasha sidjelka? hryven’ p’jat sot, shist sot, ne bil’she. v misjats’. skil’ky polochaje tam zhe sama sidjelka z Ukrajiny? ja dumaju shcho=	tell me, how much does our nurse get? five, six hundred hryven, not more. a month. how much does this nurse from Ukraine probably get there on her own? I think that=
Maryna	=°tysjachu dolariv°=	=°a thousand dollars°=
Ksenya	=tysjachu dolariv, vona des’ tak i poluchaje- ljudy- Vika, tam vyshchyj riven’ zhyttja, rozumijesh?	=a thousand dollars, she gets around that, peop- Vika, it’s a higher standard of living, you know?
Sofiya	tam mozhe hirshe znannja, ale lipshyj riven’ zhyttja, °ja- ja prosto hovorju°	maybe there’s worse information there, but it’s an ideal the standard of living, °I- I only say°
Vika	dobre. vsë.	good. and that’s all.
Ksenya	[davaite dal’she=	[give us another one=
FST	[davaite dal’she=	[give us another one=
Ksenya	=bo zaraz posvarymsja	=because now we’re fighting

In her narrative, Vika paints a bleak picture of the Ukrainian migrant as a person who has no choice but to migrate with false documents, and who is powerless at the hands of both the Ukrainian and the European states where they end up. In telling this story, the discussion shifts towards issues of immigrant labour rights, forcing the group to face the deeper ramifications of migration beyond employment opportunities and livable wages. After attempting to change the subject, Ksenya repeats her initial stance: the hopes of higher wages are enough to justify why Ukrainians would risk becoming undocumented workers in Europe. While the girls agree that migration will solve many of the economic hardships Ukrainians face at home, their peer group harmony is threatened over the reality that those of different socioeconomic classes may have very different migration experiences and opportunities.

These teenagers find themselves crossing the existing peer group boundaries in taking various stances on migration. Just as Ksenya unexpectedly finds herself positively aligning with non-friend Sofiya in their shared desire to live in Europe, Vika now finds herself in alignment with working-class, non-friends in her desire to remain living Ukraine and in her apprehension of working abroad. Furthermore, the experience of her grandmother’s friend has had an impact on Vika’s stance on migration. If someone like her grandmother’s friend could only migrate with falsified documents and potentially end up in jail because of them, then others like her might one day end up in a similar position. For Vika, undocumented migration is not only the fate of the poor or uneducated, it could happen to a middle-class person like herself.

The Ukraines and Europes that these teenagers describe contrast both economically and morally. The stances taken by these teenage girls support the idea that many Ukrainians migrate for good reasons. Ksenya’s stance in favor of migration highlights the superior European schooling system, and the benefits that higher European wages can bring to migrants, their families, and wider Ukraine in the long term. However, these teenagers hold divergent stances when it comes to the value of migration at a larger scale. For Vika and many of her working-class peers, living abroad can also lead to the rejection of Ukraine, an immoral greediness and focus on individual improvement over that of one’s community, and a life of ease that ignores and avoids the problems faced by their compatriots living in Ukraine. In addition, migration may take away their social support networks and leave them at the mercy of foreign powers, regardless of their social class. This latter stance suggests a traditionally moral Ukraine and a degraded Europe that threatens it; if all of Ukraine were to become like this Europe, it would no longer be Ukraine.

CONCLUSION: STANCE-TAKING REFLECTIONS OF CONFLICTING VIEWS ON MIGRATION IN UKRAINE

The stances taken and discussed in the ISTs towards migration are connected to the teenagers’ perceptions of Ukraine, and Ukrainians, at the multiple levels (Peacock, 2012; 2016). For example, their stances contrast Ukrainians who decide to migrate and those who do not, between Ukrainian emigrants and those living in their host countries, and between the typical life in Ukraine and in these host countries. Among their various stances, the teenagers seem to agree that western Ukrainians have found themselves on the losing side of the “have-nots,” while the countries abroad provide better opportunities for education and better financial gains, which makes it more difficult for them to become “normal” and “European”, as they deserve.

In their stance-taking, young people draw upon views and values of migration to position themselves both towards the topic of migration, and to align themselves towards their peers. When these views are situated within different logic worlds, however, stance-taking can become a complex process of multiple participants working together to manage (dis)alignments and maintain the pre-existing social order. Participants’ various competing social identities may also influence how they position themselves towards contentious issues and other participants’ stances. Emerging social class identities, such as those in places under transition, can affect which views and values young people are most familiar with, as well as which expectations they hold. In other words, stance-taking, and the worlds that create and are created in the process of stance-taking, highlight the various ways in which people may live in different worlds, worlds that delimit the kinds of experiences they have and what kind of people they may become.

In western Ukraine, teenagers’ stances on migration are shaped by their social positions and the particular worlds these positions create. In the examples discussed in this paper, the stances taken by the Ukrainian teenagers show how they try to make meaning of the conflicting views on migration that exist in the Ukrainian society. The stances they take reflect their values, their aspirations, and their fears. These stances also reflect teenagers’ attempts to try to make meaning of the conflicting views on migration and the life abroad that circulate in the mainstream society. At the same time, the stances the teenagers take bring up underlying social differences, such as social class and their status in a peer group, which unintentionally threaten to disrupt the existing friendship group identities and boundaries. As these teenagers work to manage their conflicting evaluations of Ukrainian migration, they simultaneously mitigate or highlight their (dis)alignments with their peers along friendship and class lines.

The ways in which these youth view Ukrainian migrants can also have a larger impact on Ukrainian society. The debates over whether migrants are retaining or rejecting their Ukrainian identity reveal not just ambivalence towards the role of Ukraine in various perspectives of global migration, but also in how to define Ukrainian identity. While some leave little room for emigrants to remain authentically Ukrainian, others see emigrants as potentially creating a new kind of a hyphenated, dual identity, one that combines the best of Ukraine and Europe.

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Peacock, E. A. (2016). Spatiotemporal ambivalences of youth identities: Striving to be authentic, yet worldly. In N. Worth & C. Dwyer (Eds.), Identities and subjectivities (pp. 493-510). Geographies of children and young people, vol. 4. Singapore: Springer.

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i The names of both schools and all participants are pseudonyms.

ii FST refers to a female student who could not be identified by name on the audio recording.

May 15, 2018May 17, 2018

“Maybe Jesus knows sign”: Resistance through identity formation

Volume 2(1): 2018

TIMOTHY Y. LOH, Georgetown University

ABSTRACT

This anthropological research paper explores how Deaf Christians negotiate their identity as members of two distinct identity groups: Deaf and Christian. The historical perception of Deaf and other disabled peoples in the church has not been positive, and a number of Christians today also view disability as one consequence of a fallen world that God will eventually restore. Since—beginning in the 1960s and continuing until the present time—many Deaf people believe that Deafness is a cultural, even ethnic, identity centered around American Sign Language rather than a disability (Lane, 2005), Deaf Christians in America today occupy a unique position of belonging to two identity groups, whose beliefs may conflict with one another and who may not have the same perspective on what constitutes disability. Using ethnographic evidence among Deaf Christians in Washington, DC, I argue that Deaf Christian identity formation can be seen as a nexus of resistance against deaf-deficient narratives in Christianity, which have historical roots and still hold much currency today. My interlocutors do not necessarily see a conflict between their Deaf and Christian identities, seeing both instead as a single identity of “Deaf Christian,” which they index (Ochs, 2009) through conversion narratives, a discourse of “God’s purpose,” and a desire for better inclusion. In using these language forms, Deaf Christians not only point to its existence but also serve to reinforce its existence.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article reprend une recherche anthropologique et explore comment les Chrétiens Sourds négocient leur identité en tant que membres de deux groupes identitaires distincts : les Sourds et les Chrétiens. La perception historique des sourds et des autres personnes handicapées dans l’Église n’a pas été positive, et un certain nombre de Chrétiens considèrent encore aujourd’hui le handicap comme une conséquence d’un monde déchu que Dieu restaurera. Depuis le début des années 1960, de nombreux sourds croient que la surdité est une identité culturelle, voire ethnique, centrée autour de la langue des signes américaine, plutôt qu’un handicap (Lane, 2005). Les personnes sourdes et chrétiennes aux États-Unis bénéficient donc d’une double appartenance à ces groupes identitaires, dont les croyances peuvent éventuellement entrer en conflits et qui ne partagent pas la même définition du handicap. En utilisant des preuves ethnographiques parmi les Chrétiens Sourds à Washington, je soutiens que la formation de l’identité chrétienne des sourds peut être considérée comme un lien de résistance contre les récits sourds-déficients dans le christianisme, qui ont des racines historiques et qui demeurent encore vivaces. Mes interlocuteurs ne perçoivent pas nécessairement un conflit entre leurs identités de Sourds et de Chrétiens, considérant les deux comme une seule identité de « Sourd-Chrétien », qu’ils indiquent (Ochs, 2009) à travers des récits de conversion, un discours sur « le dessein de Dieu » et le désir d’une meilleure intégration. En utilisant ces formes de langage, les Chrétiens sourds montrent leur existence, mais s’en servent aussi afin de la renforcer.

Keywords: deafness, Deafness, disability, religion, Christianity, identity, indexicality, linguistic anthropology.

INTRODUCTION

During our interview, Lucas1 recounted a story to me told to him by his brothers-in-law, who had both attended Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in the world, in the early 2000s. On the first day of their class on Deaf2 history in America, the professor asked the class, “Who here is Christian?” A few students raised their hands. Pointing at each of them in turn, the professor said, “You. . .you. . .you. . . are stupid and feeble-minded.”

Laughing at the absurdity of the situation, Lucas went on to explain that this professor also coauthored a book about the making of the Deaf community in America, in which he had written:

The New Testament contains neither commandments to treat deaf people decently nor promises that one day all shall be free of disabilities. . . they are depicted as sick beings to be cured by the miraculous powers of Jesus. The deaf individual is lost as a human being. Mark shows no concern or empathy for the deaf man; he merely exploits his condition to demonstrate supernatural power. The possibility that deaf persons may be part of God’s plan, that He created them for a larger purpose, is absent. (Van Cleve & Crouch, 1989, p. 3)

When Lucas had finished signing out the paragraph, he said, “I read it and it’s clear that [the author] isn’t interpreting the Scripture in the proper way. You have to read it in context. He is taking a sentence out of the context and it means something different—but that’s my view.” Lucas believed that the professor was writing from an atheist’s perspective, and therefore drew such dire conclusions; for himself, however, as a Christian of more than 40 years, the notion that God has such a low view of deaf people, and that he did not have a purpose for them, was simply inconceivable.

The anecdote I share above illustrates the central problematic I discuss in this paper: the relationship between Deafness and Christianity; in particular, the unique identity configuration of individuals with both Deaf and Christian identities. In this context, Deafness refers to a cultural identity centered around American Sign Language rather than to physiological hearing loss, distinguished by the use of the capital “d”. As Harlan Lane (2005) has written, “It has become widely known that there is a Deaf-World in the United States, as in other nations, citizens whose primary language is American Sign Language (ASL) and who identify as members of that minority culture” (p. 291).

Deaf Christians in the United States are in the unique position of belonging to both Deaf and Christian identity groups. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing until the present time, the former group have believed that Deafness is a cultural, even ethnic, identity. Many, given the choice, would rather stay Deaf than become part of the hearing community; for example, Lane (2005) recounted an incident when Gallaudet’s first Deaf president, I. King Jordan, was asked on Sixty Minutes if he would like to be hearing, to which his response was, “That’s almost like asking a black person if he would rather be white. . .I don’t think of myself as missing something or as incomplete” (p. 298).

The latter group, on the other hand, views disability (of which deafness is often considered a part) theologically, as one consequence of a fallen world that God will eventually restore. Historically, in traditional Christian doctrine, deaf people were often portrayed as victims of circumstance in need of healing, as the healing of disabilities was taken as a sign of Jesus’ ministry on earth (Matthew 11:4-5). In extreme cases, they were seen as being beyond salvation, based for instance in the Bible verse: “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17), a view which Deaf historians Van Cleve and Crouch (1989) argued is falsely attributed to Saint Augustine, whose view towards deaf people was far more charitable. Whatever the case, “people who interpreted the Bible literally believed that it indicated that those who are deaf are denied the possibility of faith. Without faith, they cannot be Christians and cannot be saved” (p. 4). These two sets of beliefs seem to be in tension: is a deaf person disabled or not? Does a deaf person need to be healed?

In this research project, I use anthropological methods to explore the question: does an identity conflict exist for Deaf Christians? If so, how do they reconcile and resolve the conflict? I ultimately argue that a unified Deaf Christian identity exists among my informants that is indexed through three linguistic characteristics: conversion narratives, a discourse of God’s purpose, and a desire for better inclusion. Deaf Christian identity formation, I argue, can be seen as a nexus of resistance against deaf-deficient narratives in Christianity, which have historical roots and continue to hold much currency today.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Anthropologist Joel Robbins (2003) has argued that although there exist a few ethnographies of particular Christian communities, an anthropology of Christianity for itself—as a “self-conscious, comparative project” (p. 191)—has yet to truly develop, especially compared to an anthropology of Islam. Anthropological studies on the relationship between disability and Christianity are even fewer, with only one scholar, Leila Monaghan (1991), writing about the interplay of Christian and Deaf identities. She discussed these identities in the context of the founding of two Deaf churches, however, without examining if these identities come into conflict. However, the question of identity conflicts for disabled Christians did prompt Kathy Black (1996), ex-chaplain at Gallaudet University, to write A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability about healing narratives in the Bible, focusing on theological views as opposed to lived experiences of Deaf Christians. The latter aspect is the focus of this project.

Language is a useful index as an analytical tool for helping us understand how identities are formed and performed by individuals. From an anthropological framework, I follow anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) in focusing on “discourse and practice” (p. 147) as a way to avoid essentialising my informants and presenting their culture as static and unchanging. According to Elinor Ochs’ (2009) Indexicality Principle, people use particular language forms (such as interrogative forms, diminutive affairs, raised pitch, and so on) to point to particular situational meanings (such as temporal, spatial, social identities, social acts and activities, affective and epistemic stances, and so on). A linguistic index, Ochs defined, is “a structure. . .that is used variably from one situation to another and becomes conventionally associated with particular situational dimensions such that when that structure is used, the form invokes those situational dimensions” (p. 406). In particular, Ochs claimed that people use language to index social identity, for example, in hierarchical West Samoan society, “the verbs sau [“come”] and alu [“go”] index that the speaker is of a higher rank than the addressee” (p. 407). Thus, it is appropriate for older siblings to direct imperatives using these verbs at their younger siblings to index their seniority, but not for younger siblings to use them on their older siblings.

Bailey (2000) further elaborated upon how people intentionally and unintentionally use language to index identity by stating that “analysis of language and naturally occurring discourse is a means to understanding how individuals, as social actors, highlight social boundaries and activate facets of identity” (p. 192). He goes on to explain how second-generation Dominican Americans use language practices to highlight their unique identity position and differentiate themselves from other identity groups. For example, they spoke Spanish to differentiate themselves from African Americans, used certain features of African American Vernacular English to differentiate themselves from white Americans, and spoke English to differentiate themselves from Dominicans from the Dominican Republic. Coupland and Jaworski (2009a) also wrote:

Rather than reflecting society and an individual’s place within it, language use is constitutive of social differences and identities. Speakers are able to make active and reasoned linguistic choices, while also responding to the combination of social constraints regulating and restricting their verbal repertoires. (p. 31)

However, Bailey seemed to take for granted the existence of a Dominican American identity without taking into account the process of its formation and the potential conflicts that come with the meshing of two disparate identities. To understand possible responses to identity conflict, Rodriguez and Ouellette (2000) interviewed gay and lesbian Christians, who are analogous to Deaf Christians in that they also belong to two distinct identity groups whose beliefs may conflict with each other. In a similar way to disabled people, there are LGBTQ-negative narratives in Christianity, particularly American evangelicalism, which may cause an identity conflict among gay and lesbian Christians; however, these Christians may not see their sexual orientation as a choice, whereas Deaf identity, as I will elaborate upon further, is often consciously adopted. Rodriguez and Ouellette wrote that there were four strategies in response to gay Christian identity conflict: rejecting the gay identity, rejecting the Christian identity, compartmentalising, and integrating the two identities. They argued that most of the gay Christians they interviewed have successfully integrated these identities and no longer see a conflict between the two. I argue that the Deaf Christians that I interviewed have similarly integrated their identities and no longer see conflict between them.

The participants used a number of stories to index their identities as Deaf Christians, and these narratives are an important discursive tool that allows people to not only present who they are but also better understand who they are. Schriffin (1996) analysed two stories told by Jewish-American women to demonstrate how they construct their identities, using language to display their epistemic and agentive selves, their role in the family, and their identities as mothers. She emphasised the importance of narrative, the centerpiece of her argument:

Narrative is a means by which to arrive at an understanding of the self as emergent from actions and experiences, both in relation to general themes or plots and as located in a cultural matrix of meanings, beliefs, and practices. The form, content, and performance of narrative thus all provide sensitive indices of our personal selves and our social and cultural identities. (p. 194)

In my research, therefore, I attempt to elicit and analyse narratives that point to aspects of the participants’ identities.

METHODOLOGY

This paper is based on data collected from five qualitative interviews I conducted with Deaf Christians over Skype as part of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a large, multi-sited evangelical church with a Deaf ministry in Washington, D.C. over the period of a year and a half. Interestingly, the theme of disability rarely came up during this period (which could in fact point to a resolved conflict between Deaf and Christian identities), and so my findings are derived primarily from the interviews I conducted rather than from my fieldwork, during which I asked questions specifically regarding this topic.

I conducted one interview with each participant. Interviews lasted between 40 minutes and an hour and 10 minutes. I video-recorded these interviews on my laptop and then annotated them with ELAN for significant themes and important instances of linguistic use. Any quotes that I later use in this article have been translated from ASL into English by me,3,4 and I have strived to preserve the voice of the participant as far as possible by using a more literal, word-for-word approach. In line with more qualitative sociolinguistic work that has been done in recent years (see, for example, Bucholtz, 1999; Juspal & Coyle, 2010; Schriffin, 1996), rather than extrapolating my data to generalise about the experiences of all Deaf Christians, I am more interested in exploring the range of possible responses that individuals in such a position may use to respond to an identity conflict. The qualitative data I collected are useful for “helping us understand the intricacies and local complexities of more particular instances, seen ‘from the inside'” (Coupland & Jaworski, 2009b, p. 19), that is, from the perspective of Deaf Christians themselves.

Of the five participants I interviewed, four were regular attendees of the evangelical church in Washington, DC that I mentioned earlier in this section (where I was also an attendee) and had been for at least two years prior to gathering the data. The church is a large multi-site church affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination with a number of locations in the DC metropolitan area; while the vast majority of attendees are hearing, they have a small Deaf ministry at their main campus, where one of the services is interpreted into ASL. The fifth participant had attended the church at least once but now regularly attends another hearing-majority church that also has a Deaf ministry.

While all five had some degree of hearing loss and were fluent in ASL, only one of them was a native user. Jonathan had grown up in a hearing family and attended a Deaf school from two to five before transferring to a mainstream school where he did not sign as he was educated alongside non-signing hearing students. He began learning ASL again while in his first year of college and then transferred to Gallaudet where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in Deaf Studies. Vikram had grown up in a deaf family in India, using a variety of homesigns and attending mainstream schools, and only learnt ASL after moving to the United States and attending Gallaudet University. Also mainstreamed alongside non-hearing peers, Lucas did not sign growing up and graduated from a hearing college in Louisiana. After graduation, he moved to Washington DC where he immersed himself in ASL and now uses it as his primary form of communication. Chelsea, the only native ASL user, has a history of hearing loss in her family and her mother and six of her seven siblings are deaf (two were born deaf). She was born hearing and began signing with her Deaf mother and older brother at a young age. She began experiencing hearing loss at the age of 15 and started wearing hearing aids, but did not identify as culturally Deaf until the last two years of high school when she attended a Deaf school. The last, Rachel, was born to and grew up in a hearing family in Singapore. As she was mainstreamed for most of her life, she did not identify as culturally Deaf until she went to Australia where she obtained her undergraduate degree in deaf education and worked as a teacher for deaf children. She spent 11 years there before coming to Gallaudet for her graduate degree and has been learning ASL intensively since then.

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

The analysis of the data first points to the fact that most of the participants recognise that there could be a conflict between Deaf and Christian identities, though they might not have personally experienced it themselves. Jonathan told me, for instance, that he had struggled with this very conflict between his Deaf and Christian identities in the past (as will be related in a story later). Lucas, who related the anecdote that begins this article, responded that many Deaf people had been “hurt by the church,” given the historical Christian perception of deafness as disability and even a disqualifier for salvation. On the contrary, Chelsea was very adamant in saying that she had never felt a conflict between her identity as a Deaf person and as a Christian. For Vikram, he had personally never felt a conflict between these two identities; when I asked him whether there was one, he was genuinely perplexed and asked me what I meant by that question. However, for both Chelsea and Vikram, they acknowledged that others might perceive the conflict I referred to.

For all the participants, however, they did not see or no longer saw a conflict between Deaf and Christian identities for themselves, instead assuming a new identity of being a “Deaf Christian,” one that they index through language.5 Aside from the question of whether a conflict existed, the data revealed three common themes in the participants’ responses that index the Deaf Christian identity: conversion narratives, a discourse of purpose, and a desire for better inclusion. As I discuss later in my analysis, this Deaf Christian identity and its concomitant themes should be read as a form of resistance against disability-negative narratives present in non-Deaf Christian circles.

Conversion Narratives

The first theme is data was conversion narratives. Conversion narratives are common within evangelical Christianity and wider Christian culture and are often called “testimonies.” These narratives point to the moment at which a person decides to become a Christian and often involves some element of realisation that they did not like how they were living up to that point. For example, Jonathan told the story of how he converted at a co-educational camp: “I remember hearing the story about Jesus knocking on the door of your heart. Jesus says he wants to come in, but you—the person—need to open your heart to let him in.” Chelsea also recounted that she had grown up going to Catholic church and school but never really knew what she believed. She felt the message that she heard growing up was always the same, and never had an impact on her. However, “when I got to my old church, HCC (Heritage Community Church), that’s when I understood [the message of the gospel].”

At the same time, the participants had a similar Deaf “conversion narrative,” also a trope of Deaf literature, if not necessarily labelled as such due to the religious connotations of the word “conversion.” These stories often involve a person who grows up without knowing about Deaf culture and understands deafness only as hearing loss; however, when they encounter the Deaf community for the first time, they find their “true home” there and adopt a Deaf identity (see, for example, Deaf Like Me and Deaf Again). The participants had grown up in primarily hearing environments—Lucas even stated that he had thought of himself as hearing because of his environment—and used speech growing up, but had found the Deaf community at a later stage and now primarily used sign. Jonathan recounted, “Later, when I was 17—or about 16, thereabouts—I started signing again.6 That was when I started to develop my identity from hearing—well, not really hearing, but more hard-of-hearing, more disconnected from the Deaf community. . . I started to make my way to become Deaf.”

These conversion narratives indicate how Deaf identity emerges out of a context of community and is then consciously or subconsciously adopted by its adherents and demonstrated through the learning and deliberate use of sign language.

Discourse of Purpose

The second theme is what I call the discourse of “God’s purpose.” All of the participants, at some point, mentioned their belief that God made them Deaf for some reason. While for Chelsea, the purpose was more personal, for Jonathan, Lucas, and Rachel, it was so that they could reach out to other members of the Deaf community who were not Christians.

For Chelsea, the purpose God had for her was more personal, in that she felt that the most important thing for her was having a relationship with God. As she said, “I can feel, I can have a connection with God. I have feelings, emotions. . . That’s why God made me this way: unique.”

Jonathan believed differently though. After he was not healed of hearing loss at a church service when he was 16 or 17, he had a change of heart. As he recounted:

The more I thought about it, God was really showing me, teaching me, that he made me this way for a purpose. He was not opening my ears, but opening my heart, opening my eyes, to see that his plan and purpose for me. I believe he made me Deaf so I could participate in the Deaf community, in Deaf culture, to sign. . . so I can support Deaf and hearing integration [in the church body].

He also believed that part of God’s purpose for him was also to educate other hearing Christians about Deaf identity, that many Deaf people were happy to be Deaf and did not want to be healed.

Lucas had an even more dramatic shift. He had attended a Deaf school when he was younger, but did not have a good experience there and was often made fun of by other Deaf students because he was not as fluent in sign. He had therefore eschewed anything relating to Deafness in his older years and attended a hearing college. However, he felt that in college he received a call from God to enter full-time ministry serving the Deaf community and, after speaking to his pastor, decided to move to DC to pursue that and became a full-time worker in campus ministry.

Desire for Better Inclusion

The third theme that emerged through the interviews was a desire for better inclusion in the wider Christian body as a particular group, albeit in different forms. For Lucas and Jonathan, they preferred that Deaf Christians have their own church and, in particular, their own Deaf pastor. As Lucas expressed, accessibility in a hearing church was “no substitute for a pastor preaching in sign language compared to a hearing pastor who is preaching with an interpreter.” For him, it was important for Deaf Christians to access the message and the gospel “in their own language,” that is, ASL. Even with interpreters, he felt that some parts of the message were always lost. Jonathan insisted that no matter what a hearing church did to integrate its Deaf members, Deaf people “would always complain”—they needed a church they could consider their own, not one in which they felt they were in the margins.

Vikram, on the other hand, felt that Deaf Christians could be better integrated and that their needs had to be better met. For example, interpreters should stay after the service to help facilitate conversations; currently, he said, interpreters finish interpreting for the service and leave immediately after: “It’s rude!” he said. He insisted on the need for more social events, such as picnics, in which Deaf and hearing members of the church could interact and get to know each other better. Rachel, too, expressed her appreciation of her church’s efforts to provide, for example, sign language classes for hearing people so that they could converse with the Deaf members in the church.

DISCUSSION

The three themes that emerge from the data—the use of conversion narratives, the discourse of God’s purpose, and the desire for better inclusion—serve linguistically to index the integrated Deaf Christian identity that the participants have adopted. I argue that, in some ways, these three language forms are what Bucholtz (1999) has called “positive identity practices,” which are “those [practices] in which individuals engage in order actively to construct a chosen identity” (p. 211). These positive identity practices, which Bucholtz distinguished from negative identity practices—defined as “those that individuals employ to distance themselves from a rejected identity” (p. 211)—take place at different linguistic levels, including discourse. In the same way that nerd girls in Bucholtz’s study displayed a particular orientation to language form that includes punning, parody, and word coinage, to legitimise their belonging to the nerd girl community, the participants in this study use the three stated discourse-level linguistic strategies to index their belonging to the Deaf Christian community.

The Christian conversion narrative, in particular, is important in indexing belonging in the Christian community, given its prominence in the evangelical Christian tradition (which the Assemblies of God is part of). Everyone is expected to have a “testimony” and having one points to a pivotal point in the Christian’s journey, whether it be a “shift to Christianity from no religion” or the “[strengthening of] a prior commitment to Christianity” (Jindra et al., 2012, p. 2). In fact, at the church, not infrequently, there would be a short, five-minute testimony given by a member of the church just prior to the sermon that could be about God’s deliverance from a particular suffering, a renewed commitment to the faith, a recent conversion to the faith, and topics of that nature. Some of the participants were likely socialised into that experience as regular attendees of the church. Possession of a conversion narrative legitimised their membership in the Christian community, while the language the narrative was given in, ASL, plus a conversion narrative of entry into Deaf culture, indicated their unique position as members also of the Deaf community.

The formation of a Deaf Christian identity was in many ways a rejection of and a form of resistance against the label of “disabled”—and often, “in need of healing”—that hearing Christians impose on them. This is seen in that the discourse of “God’s purpose” that was utilised by many participants was often linked to specific instances of misunderstanding or ignorance by hearing people. For example, Vikram recounted an incident when he visited an interpreted service at a church in Chicago. During the service, he saw two people close by whispering among themselves, and knew immediately that they were going to pray for his healing. Sure enough, they laid their hands upon his ears and started praying. Nothing happened, but after they finished praying, one of them handed him a piece of paper, on it asking him if he wanted to give a testimony. He agreed, walked on stage, and said through the interpreter: “Thank you to the two of you for praying for me. For me to hear—you all want it for me, I understand, because you have pity on deaf people. BUT God—He sees me and He doesn’t [have pity on me]. He gave me everything. This body is what He gave to me and I’m happy with it” (emphasis his). This discourse allowed the participants to define identity for themselves and to see themselves as active protagonists rather than victims of circumstance in their own life stories.

It is also important to note that the three themes that emerged in the interviews with the participants do not merely index the Deaf Christian identity, but in fact also serve to create it. This is what Elinor Ochs (2009) has called “indexical property of constitutiveness.” As she explained, “when interlocutors use indexical forms, they may constitute some social structure in the immediate situation at hand” (p. 411). For example, as mentioned earlier, West Samoan society is very hierarchical and the verbs sau and alu index asymmetric relationships between higher-ranking and lower-ranking members of the society. When older siblings use these verbs on their younger siblings and when younger siblings obey, they in effect recreate the unequal power dynamic. When the participants in the study use these language forms to index the Deaf Christian identity, and also when this identity is recognised by others inside and outside that community (for example, the church agreeing to the Deaf ministry’s request for sign language classes or more interpreters), they essentially reify its unique existence.

LIMITATIONS

There are a number of drawbacks to the methodology I used. The first is my relationship with some of the participants: we are not only fellow church members, but also friends and that could have influenced both their willingness to speak to me as well as the answers they gave me. Our friendship could also mean that they were more honest with me than they would have been with a complete stranger; however, there is no way to discern this. Second, the data I collected was elicited rather than naturally occurring. As Lucas et al. (2013) have written, there is an inherent conflict in data collection of this sort because although sociolinguists are interested in “the language signers’ and speakers’ use when they are not being observed,” researchers often have “to record their production in situations that often lead to self-consciousness” (p. 545). The third is that I am neither deaf nor a native user of ASL. Hill wrote that “ASL users are. . . sensitive to a signer’s audiological status (e.g., Deaf or Hearing)” and recount an incident when a Black Deaf interviewee shifted from signing to speaking when she discovered that one of the researchers was White and Hearing, even though until that point she had been signing fully without voicing (p. 111-112; capitals in the original). While some of these issues, such as my audiological status, cannot be changed, I hope in future projects to mitigate them, through collaboration with a Deaf researcher or recruitment of participants that I do not know.

CONCLUSION

As shown in the data and argued in this paper, for some Christians, at least, there is a real identity conflict between the Deaf and the Christian identity. However, the participants in this study have managed to resolve the identity conflict by integrating the two, pointing to a unique identity configuration that is both Deaf and Christian, not belonging exclusively to one or the other. They index this new identity by three key linguistic elements: the use of the conversion narratives, the discourse of God’s purpose, and the desire for better inclusion. The title of this piece comes from the interview I conducted with Vikram; when I asked him whether there would be Deaf people in heaven, he responded emphatically, “Why not? Maybe Jesus knows sign.” This response, in which Vikram posits a signing, even Deaf, Jesus, captures the attempt of Deaf Christians to reappropriate a faith that accommodates their membership in the church, in response to disability-negative narratives that have historically served to exclude them from it.

I ultimately hope that this project will serve as a starting point for further research that will inform churches seeking to set up ministries to the Deaf or existing churches with Deaf ministries on how to better serve this particular demographic. More generally, I hope that it provides insight into the issues that arise and the transformations that may take place in the interplay between religion and religious identity and social and cultural developments.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was made possible through a Doyle Engaging Difference Undergraduate Fellowship 2014-15, granted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. I thank Melody Fox Ahmed and Dr. Sara Singha for supporting the project, Dr. Risa Shaw for introducing me to the sociolinguistics of the Deaf community, my interlocutors for generously giving of their time to answer my questions, as well as my peer mentor at J-BILD, Dr. Caroline Riches, and the rest of the editorial team at the journal for pushing me to clarify the terms of my argument and to give my argument greater coherence and form. I presented earlier drafts of this paper at Ways of Knowing 2016: The 5th Annual Graduate Conference on Religion at Harvard Divinity School and 15th Annual Graduate Research Symposium at the College of William and Mary and am grateful for the feedback I received there. Thanks also to Carine Zanchi for translating my abstract into French.

REFERENCES

Abu-Lughod, L. (1991). Writing against culture. In R. G. Fox (Ed.), Recapturing anthropology: working in the present (pp. 137-162). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Bailey, B. (2000). The language of multiple identities among Dominican Americans. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 10(2), 190-223.

Black, K. (1996). A healing homiletic: Preaching and disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society, 28, 203-223.

Coupland, N., & Jaworski, A. (2009a). Language variation. In N. Coupland & A. Jaworski (Eds.), The new sociolinguistics reader (pp. 23-33). London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Coupland, N. & Jaworski, A. (2009b). Social worlds through language. In N. Coupland & A. Jaworski (Eds.), The new sociolinguistics reader (pp. 1-21). London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Drolsbaugh, M. (2008). Deaf again. Springhouse: Handwave Publications.

Hill, J. (2013). Vignette 6c. Special issues in collecting interview data for sign language projects. In C. Mallinson, B. Childs, & G. Van Herk (Eds.), Data collection in sociolinguistics: Methods and applications (pp. 110-113). London & New York: Routledge.

Jindra, I. W., Woods, R., Badzinski, D., & Paris, J. (2012). Gender, religiosity, and the telling of Christian conversion narratives. Journal for the Sociological Integration of Religion and Society, 2(1), 1-23.

Juspal, R, & Coyle, A. (2010). Arabic is the language of the Muslims – that’s how it was supposed to be: Exploring language and religious identity through reflective accounts from young British-born South Asians. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 13(1), 17-36.

Lane, H. (2005). Ethnicity, ethics, and the deaf-world. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 10(3), 291-310.

Lucas, C., Mirus, G., Palmer, J. L., Roessler, N. J., & Frost, A. (2013). The effect of new technologies on sign language research. Sign Language Studies, 13(4), 541-564.

Monaghan, L. (1991). The founding of two deaf churches: The interplay of deaf & Christian identities. Sign Language Studies, 73(1), 431-452.

Ochs, E. (2009). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. J. Gumperz & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, No. 17. Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 407-437). New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press.

Robbins, J. (2003). What is a Christian? Notes toward an anthropology of Christianity. Religion, 33(3), 191-199.

Rodriguez, E. M., & Ouellette, S. C. (2000). Gay and lesbian Christians: Homosexual and religious identity integration in the members and participants of a gay-positive church. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 39(3), 333-347.

Schiffrin, D. (1996). Narrative as self-portrait: Sociolinguistic constructions of identity. Language in Society, 25(2), 167-203.

Spradley, T. S., & Spradley, J. P. (1978). Deaf like me. New York: Random House.

Van Cleve, J. V., & Crouch, B. A. (1989). A place of their own: Creating the Deaf community in America. Washington: Gallaudet University Press.

1 All the participants have been given pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

2 Deaf refers to the cultural/ethnic identity, centered around the use of sign language, whereas deaf refers to an audiological status (whether one can hear or not). The latter (deaf) is a broader category than Deaf.

3 An important limitation, but necessary due to IRB restrictions. Any translation errors are mine alone.

4 I am a hearing researcher who has been involved in the d/Deaf community for many years, beginning in Singapore where I first learned (Singaporean) sign language. I began learning ASL (related to a certain extent to Singaporean Sign Language) in my first year in college and had become proficient enough to take graduate level classes in ASL at Gallaudet University in my last year.

5 As a caveat, Vikram said that he was not a Christian, but rather, a “follower of Jesus,” a phrase he preferred given disagreements between different Christian denominations.

6 As mentioned in the methodology, Jonathan went to a Deaf school from ages two to five and was educated in a mainstream school without sign thereafter.

November 15, 2017November 15, 2017

Identity as a Research Lens in Science and Physics Education

Volume 1(1): 2017

CHRIS GOSLING, McGill University

ABSTRACT

Gender research in physics education has traditionally focused on studying learning differences between males and females, understanding how to present content in a way that is more accessible for females, or uncovering explanations for observed differences in engagement with physics (e.g., Hazari, Sonnert, Sadler, & Shanahan, 2010; Kost, Pollock, & Finkelstein, 2009). Recent work in Physics Education Research (PER) calls for an epistemological shift (Traxler, Cid, Blue, & Barthelemy, 2016) in research concerning gender, one that focuses on the complex and intersectional nature of student learning as gendered identity formation within the culture of school science. This shift is necessary because the traditional approaches to gender research within the Physics Education Research community of practice cannot account for the contextual nature of gender nor its intersection with other factors. The science education community has much to offer in this regard, having developed and applied identity formation as an analytical tool (e.g., Carlone & Johnson, 2007). The aim of this critical literature review is to present a survey of the relevant literature that investigates how identity is employed by researchers and how its use can help move gender research in physics beyond a binary perspective of gender.

RÉSUMÉ

Les recherches sur le genre et l’égalité des sexes en didactique de la physique se sont traditionnellement attardées à l’étude des différences dans les apprentissages entre les garçons et les filles, comprendre comment les enseignants peuvent présenter les contenus de sorte que ces derniers soient plus accessibles chez les filles, ou découvrir des raisons expliquant les différences observées dans l’engagement des femmes en physique (Hazari, Sonnert, Sadler, et Shanahan, 2010 ; Kost, Pollock, et Finkelstein, 2009). De récentes recherches en didactique de la physique (RDP) suggèrent une transition épistémologique (Traxler, Cid, Blue, et Barthelemy, 2016) dans les études sur sur le genre, une qui met l’accent sur la nature complexe et intersectionnelle sur l’apprentissage des élèves puisque la formation de l’identité genrée et sexuée fait partie de la culture scientifique à l’école. Cette transition est nécessaire étant donné que les approches traditionnelles dans les études sur le genre dans la communauté professionnelle des pratiques enseignantes en didactique de la physique ne peuvent pas tenir pour acquis la nature contextuelle de l’égalité des sexes ni les intersections avec d’autres facteurs. La communauté des chercheurs en didactique des sciences a beaucoup à offrir à cet égard puisqu’ils ont développé et utilisé la formation identitaire comme outil d’analyse (Carlone et Johnson, 2007). Le but de cette recension des écrits critique est de présenter un sondage des écrits pertinents s’intéressant à démontrer comment l’identité est employée par les chercheurs et comment son utilisation peut soutenir d’autres études en physique au-delà de la perspective binaire du genre.

Keywords: Identity, gender, physics, science, education.

INTRODUCTION

Despite decades of concern about female representation in the physical sciences, physics lags behind the other sciences in both the recruitment and retention of women to postsecondary degree programs in Canada, the United States, and internationally (Francis et al., 2016). The demographics of physicists do not reflect those of the wider population; for example, in the United States, only 20% of bachelor’s degrees are currently awarded to women (Statistical Research Center | American Institute of Physics, 2017). This lack of progress is particularly significant given the efforts of scholars whose focus on gender issues within physics education research (PER) has endeavored to uncover ways to bring more women into the field and keep them there (see discussion in Traxler, Cid, Blue, & Barthelemy, 2016).

Gender research in PER has traditionally focused on studying learning differences between male and female students, understanding how to present content in a way that is more accessible for women, or uncovering explanations for observed differences in engagement with physics (e.g., Hazari, Sonnert, Sadler, & Shanahan, 2010; Kost-Smith et al., 2010). These related threads of inquiry have produced a detailed picture of these learning differences, but by their nature cannot capture the nuances of students’ experiences in physics and how they relate to the field. Gender research in PER has also traditionally considered “female” students as a uniform category defined in relation to their male counterparts. This approach positions female students as deficient when compared to their male counterparts (Traxler et al., 2016) and also prohibits a deeper exploration of how students, with a spectrum of gender identities, engage with and experience physics.

The limitations outlined above plague the majority of existing gender studies in PER. To address these shortcomings, scholars have called for an epistemological shift (Traxler et al., 2016) in research on gender, one that focuses on the complex and intersectional nature of student learning as gendered identity formation within the culture of school science. In addition, we must carefully consider how gender is categorised to avoid reinforcing gendered inequalities of power (Francis & Paechter, 2015). These shifts are needed because the traditional approaches to gender research within the PER community cannot account for the contextual nature of gender nor its intersection with other factors (May, 2012). Science education researchers have much to offer in this regard, having developed and applied identity formation as an analytical tool (e.g., Carlone & Johnson, 2007).

This critical literature review will first discuss the motivation for using identity as a research lens in PER. I will then compare and contrast how identity has been conceptualized and mobilized in the study of science and physics education in recent studies. Finally, this review will consider the potentially illuminating lessons in the way that these researchers conceive and deploy identity as a theoretical lens in their work.

WHY DO WE NEED IDENTITY?

A Sociocultural Perspective

In his 2001 article, Lemke describes the sociocultural perspective on science education as “viewing science, science education, and research on science education as human social activities conducted within institutional and cultural frameworks” (p. 296). Accordingly, a sociocultural approach to science education research does not consider science learning to be a stand-alone process, but rather an activity which is intricately connected to students’ lives outside of school. Lemke notes that, “students’ beliefs, attitudes, values, and personal identities” are all critical to their success in learning science (p. 305). How then, could a research approach focused solely on cognitive gains or differences between different groups of learners, hope to capture the complexity of students’ experiences? The answer, of course, is that it cannot. The process of learning science as it is currently taught frequently requires students to surrender facets of their personal identity and some of the bonds that they share with their community (Lemke, 2001). This process is most problematic for students who do not fit the dominant paradigm of a physicist—that is to say, anyone who is not white, cisgender (gender identity matching their birth sex), male, able-bodied, and heterosexual. While some non-dominant students reject these concessions and maintain their connections to their cultures and communities, in doing so, they run the risk of failing in science. A cognitive approach to understanding the process of learning science would deem these students as “unsuccessful”, but a sociocultural approach might shed light on the disconnect between the cultures of home and school while demonstrating that there are confounding influences that affect student learning. The construct of identity, in particular, is aptly suited to investigating such complex interdependencies between cultures, community, and learning.

What is identity?

Though a literature review of this nature does not require the development of a theoretical framework, it is worth defining what researchers mean when they use the term identity. Brickhouse (2001) described the process of learning as “not merely a matter of acquiring knowledge, it is a matter of deciding what kind of person you are and want to be and engaging in those activities that make one a part of the relevant communities” (p. 286). She refers to this this act of deciding what kind of person you are and want to be as identity formation. Similarly, Gee (2000) defined identity as being recognized as a certain “kind of person” (p. 99) at a given time and place. Taken together, we arrive at a working definition of identity as: the sum of one’s beliefs about oneself, one’s actions, and how one’s behavior is interpreted by others in a given context.

A note on poststructuralist terminology

Before delving into a review of recent research in science and physics education that uses identity as an analytical lens, I will pause to explain two terms that poststructuralist researchers commonly employ when talking about identity and student learning: positioning and performativity.

Positioning is used to describe the act of putting one’s self or someone else into a particular stance, most frequently during a verbal exchange or conversation (Davies & Harré, 1990). With a specific eye toward group work in physics, Berge and Danielsson (2013) wrote that “positioning is always twofold; a positioning of someone else also implies a positioning of oneself, and moreover, people can both position themselves (reflexive positioning) and position others (interactive positioning) in a conversation” (p. 1181). Consider as an example a comment that I might make while working in a small group comparing the approach a fellow group member employed to solve a problem to that I used. By voicing this aloud, I am simultaneously putting myself into a particular role (“thorough checker,” for example) and positioning my peer in a certain way (“rapid problem solver,” perhaps). It is important to note that the range of positions available during a conversation is not infinite. Though a small group of three to four students working together is itself a form of cultural production (Carlone, Johnson, & Eisenhart, 2014), the function of this group of students and the roles that each one assumes are modulated by larger discourses, such as the classroom culture, the school community, and the larger physics community as a whole.

Performativity is a term that is used to describe how individuals perform a certain role in a given context. In her writings on the nature of gender, Judith Butler (1999) wrote that performativity is “repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration” (p. xv). That is to say, performativity refers to how a person acts in ways that lead others to view them as a certain kind of person. These acts are sustained and ongoing and, for many, unconscious ways of fulfilling expected roles. Therefore, if someone is described as performing a male gender, they think of themselves as male, act in ways that they consider to be compatible with a male gender, and are recognized as having a male gender in that context. Notice that none of these elements are related to a person’s sex—a performative perspective of gender rejects the binary female/male definition completely.

It is important to note that the idea of performativity is not limited to gender and can be applied to different facets of our identities. For example, students can perform “good student” identities by acting in ways that meet the expectations that others might have for how good students should act. Finally, performativity can change based on one’s situation. For instance, the way that one performs a “good student” identity might change dependent on one’s academic course given that different teachers have differing expectations and definitions of what it means to be a good student.

Learning as Identity Formation

Understanding learning as a form of identity construction is a particularly rich approach because “it accounts for the importance of both individual agency as well as societal structures that constrain individual possibilities” (Brickhouse, 2001, p. 286). As such, the concept of identity enables researchers to determine the cause for a student’s difficulty in learning, whether because they are having difficulty grasping the information being presented or because the difficulty stems from a conflict between how a student views themselves and how they are expected to behave in class. Brickhouse (2001) provides a poignant example:

Thus a girl who is silent in science class may well be acting in this way because she aspires to be a good girl student. . . . It may be the case that a student will decide that she has no desire to be a part of the communities at school that are engaged in school science. Perhaps she finds what they do to be boring and irrelevant to her own concerns. Or perhaps she finds the other members of the community to be simply obnoxious. She chooses disengagement and ignorance in the process of deciding that she does not desire membership into school science communities. (p. 287)

In using identity as a theoretical construct, we are better able to understand student learning; it is not sufficient to say that students are or are not learning; we must aim to understand the reasons why students are learning the way that they are.

Carlone and Johnson (2007) made a compelling case for using identity to study the learning of science. They noted that existing approaches fall flat when attempting to determine why some students do not persist in science despite their qualifications to do so (Carlone & Johnson, 2007). The obvious response is that there is something about these students that is at odds with the way that they are being taught science—perhaps it is something in their backgrounds, the way they experience the courses, or the roles that they must take on in order to be successful within the culture of school science. Carlone and Johnson (2007) also highlighted how traditional approaches to studying the learning of science fail to account for students’ agency and are generally static;that is, such approaches consider factors that modulate student learning to be discrete variables, rather than allowing for a wide spectrum of responses. After chronicling the limitations of past studies of science learning, they offered identity as an alternative. This allows for accounts of structure and agency, for a performative view of gender and race, and for flexibility to be applied across large time scales and in variable contexts (Carlone & Johnson, 2007). These scholars developed a model for identity to better understand their data; I discuss this model later in this review.

A more recent call for the use of identity in science education research comes from Traxler, Cid, Blue, and Barthelemy (2016), who highlighted identity as a possible way forward for gender research in physics education given its flexibility. In particular, as a research lens, identity is not limited by a binary definition of gender; rather, it understands gender to be performative and contextual. That is to say, Traxler and her collaborators assumed a Butlerian approach to gender, describing how it is both performed and interpreted, and pointing out that the way that one’s gender is performed and interpreted depends on context. Finally, Traxler et al. (2016) noted that identity also has the potential to account for the intersection of gender with additional factors such as race or ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. Given the dearth of studies examining the confluence of such factors concerning gender in PER, this appears to be an area where the use of identity as a research lens would enable substantial gains by allowing researchers to produce a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of how students engage with physics.

EXISTING RESEARCH USING IDENTITY

A Model of Science Identity Formation: Competence, Performance, and Recognition

In their research, Carlone and Johnson (2007) created a novel model of science identity formation to understand how the experiences of their participants with science, over time, contributed to different elements of their science identities. Their definition of identity operationalizes the sociocultural definition offered by Gee (2000). Carlone and Johnson’s model maintains three facets of identity: competence, performance, and recognition; all must exist for students to fully form science identities. Competence refers to being proficient in practices that are relevant to the one’s context (a physics classroom, for example), performance refers to demonstrating this competence, and recognition refers to others perceiving this performance as credible. In the context of a physics class, these facets might look like a student having the ability to solve a particular problem, doing so in a way that their teacher can observe their work, and the teacher then confirming the suitability of their solution.

Carlone and Johnson found that the development of students’ science identities was, at times, severely hampered by their interactions with established members of the field, who did not provide the positive recognition critical for the formation of full-fledged science identities. This unconscious behavior may have occurred because the students’ performance of their competence did not meet their professor’s expectations. This is not to say that the performances were lacking, but rather, that they did not have the expected form. For example, describing a scientific idea accurately, but using different language than that common to the field, might have prevented some faculty members from recognizing their explanation as accurate.

Carlone and Johnson’s (2007) study is of critical importance, not only because it successfully utilized identity as a research lens, but also because it illuminated three essential elements that are crucial to students’ identity formation. This is particularly meaningful because if students do not form science identities, they are unlikely to be successful in their science courses and will subsequently not pursue careers in the field. Carlone and Johnson’s study also highlighted recognition as a crucial component of identity formation, which, in turn, directly impacts student learning given that an incomplete science identity may prevent students from fully engaging with science content as insiders.

Secondary Students’ Physics Identity Formation

While previous research suggests that female students are less likely to view themselves as physics people than male students, a recent study determined that students’ gendered perceptions of identity are mutable (Hazari et al., 2013; Hazari, Sonnert, Sadler, & Shanahan, 2010). In their work, Hazari et al. (2010, 2013) found that discussions about the under-representation of women in physics held a particular power to positively affect students’ physics’ identities.

Lock and Hazari’s later research (2016) built on these findings when they focused on a single classroom where discussions about the under-representation of women in physics were being conducted to investigate the impact that these discussions had on student thinking. This study concluded that these discussions offered an opportunity for students to change their views of who can be a physicist and what being a physicist entails. It also revealed that this shift can, in turn, change the way students interpret their science experiences and can also impact their physics identity and career aspirations. It is crucial to note that the shifts in student thinking occurred not only for “female” students but also for “male” students, which indicates the potential for such discussions to gradually transform the culture of physics to be a more accepting space.

Forms of competence

Gonsalves (2014) used identity as a tool to examine how students modify their behaviors or pursue different ways to demonstrate competence within the cultural norms of physics. As viewed through the lens of identity, her data “revealed two predominant ways of being recognized as a physicist: demonstrating one or more of three main types of competence (analytical, technical and academic competence); and by performing stereotypical physicist behaviour” (p. 509). These themes of competence and performance connect directly to Carlone and Johnson’s (2007) model of identity formation and further enhance it. In this case, the use of identity as a lens allowed Gonsalves to demonstrate that the competence required for students to form physics identities might assume different modes and still be recognizable by established members of the field. Her work additionally demonstrates how students modified their behavior in response to their experiences of the physics culture.

Recognition: The Role of Teachers in Secondary Students’ Science Identity Formation

Hazari, Brewe, Goertzen, and Hodapp’s (2017) study focused on factors that affect how high school students form physics identities. The researchers collected quantitative data from a large Likert-scale survey (n=962) that asked female undergraduate students to report how they viewed themselves; there were similarly asked to assess how they were positioned by their peers and by their teacher (p. 97). The students’ responses showed that recognition by high school teachers was particularly important for the formation of a physics identity for girls in high school (Hazari et al., 2017). This finding is a linchpin in the field because it demonstrates the significant influence these teachers maintain in impacting their students’ physics identity development—many teachers are ignorant of the extent to which their recognition (or lack thereof) impacts female students. Hazari et al. (2017) also found that high school is a particularly fruitful time during students’ development for them to receive positive recognition. However, Hazari et al. also noted that further research is needed to determine what counts as meaningful recognition and how the recognition can be transmitted to students. I wondered about this final aspect as I read her work, curious if the recognition must happen verbally, and in person. Or, could the recognition be transmitted using other media, such as comments and feedback on written assignments (e.g., homework or journals) or even responses to students’ posts on an electronic discussion board?

Performance: Pedagogical Approaches and Identity Disruption

The role of the teacher in a student’s physics identity formation is not limited to recognition alone; pedagogical approaches are also a key component in helping students see themselves as physics people. Carlone’s (2004) research into reformed teaching methods that endeavored to engage students in their own learning and encouraged them to think about what it means “to ‘do science’ and ‘be a science person'” (p. 393) provided clear insights into why student learning was not as successful as anticipated. Carlone’s study used the concept of identity to understand the experiences that students, with similar backgrounds, had in a novel high school physics course. Identity emerged as a construct that determines what sort of behaviors are valued within a learning environment and what kinds of roles are available for particular students to assume (pp. 396-397). The reformed teaching methods, provided by the teacher in Carlone’s study, disrupted student identity formation because they valued different modes of class participation than previous courses. This change in teaching style endangered the good student identities that students, especially female students, had cultivated in previous science courses and triggered crises for some students as they struggled to position themselves around this new way of doing science. The progressive pedagogical approach used in this course impacted students’ physics identity formation, which, in turn, affected their learning. Using identity as a theoretical lens allowed Carlone to understand their resistance to the reformed course in ways that would not have been possible otherwise.

Societal Impact of Physics as a Gendered Construct on Secondary Students

While teachers maintain influence over pedagogical approaches and their recognition given to students within the classroom, societal pressures outside the school must also be considered when looking at how physics identities are formed. Archer, Moote, Francis, DeWitt, and Yeomans’ (2016) research investigated the identity work done by girls enrolled in a variety of secondary schools across England over a ten-year period. Their longitudinal approach to understanding identity formation examined how the way society considers physics to be a masculine domain prevented girls from identifying with the field. The researchers understood gender and classroom behaviors to be performative in nature and they also mobilized the concepts of habitus and capital (Bourdieu, 1986) to examine the ways in which the students interacted with physics (Archer et al., 2016) in light of their previous experiences outside of class. The data collected indicated a strong influence from mainstream culture on the roles that were available for girls to play and about the suitability of males for careers in physics. Identity was a useful lens in this case because it provided insights into how students positioned themselves relative to physics and the degree to which they maintained their femininity while participating in physics. This is a particularly important study because it examined secondary students’ positioning around physics relative to gender, which is a topic that had not been widely explored before this work was published. Further, it is significant because, rather than looking at differences between girls and boys learning physics, it looked for variations within the group of students categorised as girls to see what enabled some students to succeed in forming physics identities.

Gendered Roles in the Physics Laboratory

Western culture’s larger understanding of physics as a masculine field is replicated within the micro-culture of the laboratory. Danielsson’s (2012) study found that, while each unique, individual student’s identity is molded and constrained by the norms of the field. Even in cases where her participants positioned themselves outside the stereotypical positions available, the participants were still comparing their own identities against those available to them in physics. Much like Archer et al. (2016), Danielsson (2012) conceptualized gender as performative but noted that these performances are constrained by the context within which one works. She wrote, “not only are the female physics students relating to masculine norms of the discipline, they may also have to deal with the norms and expectations about how a woman is supposed to be in a physics and engineering context” (p. 36). This passage illustrates how Danielsson’s use of identity as a theoretical lens makes apparent the subtle ways that student identities are produced within and in opposition to the culture of physics.

Science Identity Trajectories

Like Archer et al. (2016), Jackson and Seiler (2013) also used identity as a lens to study students’ positioning with regard to science. Rather than focusing on gender, however, they used identity to explore the trajectories of non-traditional science students at a CEGEP institution in Montréal, which spans the traditional divide between high school and university (Jackson, 2014; Jackson & Seiler, 2013). These researchers looked at how latecomers — those students who arrive in physics after an atypical academic trajectory — learn science, and how they position themselves relative to the field.

The most significant result of Jackson and Seiler’s (2013) research was the creation of a new model of identity trajectory that captures students’ science identities over time. These scholars looked at how students positioned themselves, and others, while they did identity work and found that students’ science trajectories can be disrupted by the cultural models of learning present in most science classrooms. In this instance, the use of identity as an analytic lens allowed the researchers to view the latecomers who participated in the study not just as students who struggled, but as students whose ways of learning and past experiences were incongruent with the approaches that their instructors used to currently teach them science. This created a conflict between the identities that students narrated for themselves and the identities available within science. This finding can be extended to gender research–students whose ways of learning do not fit the dominant paradigms of school science are likely to struggle to form science identities, and in turn, to learn science. From this perspective, the theoretical lens of identity produced valuable insights into the connections between instructional methods and the likelihood that students will continue their studies of science.

CONCLUSIONS

The studies highlighted above demonstrate the variety of ways in which identity can be used as a theoretical lens to produce novel insights into how students learn physics and science. In particular, this review has shown that an identity lens allows us to understand that issues with student learning are not limited to difficulties with content, but can also stem from an incompatibility between how students view themselves and the modes of behavior and learning that are expected within their physics classrooms. Carlone and Johnson’s (2007) model for identity formation set the foundation for identity work by identifying competence, performance, and recognition as elements crucial to women of colour studying science at the university level. Other researchers have built upon this model, showing that multiple types of competence can garner positive recognition (Gonsalves, 2014) and that recognition is particularly important, especially for girls at the secondary level (Hazari et al., 2017).

Furthermore, Lock and Hazari (2016) found that conversations about the under-representation of women in physics have the potential to change the way students think of the field of physics and their own place in it. Both mainstream culture and the culture of physics itself constrain the gendered roles that are possible for students to assume (Archer et al., 2016). Non-dominant students struggle to create identities against the norms of the culture of physics in an effort to maintain the way they see themselves (Danielsson, 2012). Finally, the methods that instructors use in their classrooms can have a massive impact on students whose ways of learning do not align with their instructors’ expectations. Students actively resist such changes when their good student identities are threatened (Carlone, 2004) and can end up on outbound trajectories from physics if they are not allowed to perform their competence and engage with the content (Jackson, 2014; Jackson & Seiler, 2013).

Taken as a whole, these studies present a wide variety in the ways that identity can be used to study how students learn science and physics. It is clear that, as a theoretical lens, identity allows for a consideration of aspects of student learning that are not possible with more traditional models. For example, the binary approach to gender precludes any mention of students who do not meet the female/male binary, and also positions female students as lesser than their male peers. Identity does not have the same sort of limitation, as it allows for a wide spectrum of gender to emerge. It also allows researchers the opportunity to look for variations within a given category rather than comparing categories of students against one another. Further, identity is a flexible lens, useful for examining the intersection of multiple facets of student identity simultaneously. For example, Carlone and Johnson (2007) showed that it could be used to understand the experiences of women of colour, who engage in the practices of science differently from both white women and men of colour. For the multiple reasons outlined above, identity holds tremendous potential as a research lens. It is well-suited to a wide range of research undertaken from the socio-cultural perspective and permits researchers to ask difficult questions about how students engage with science and physics.

NEXT STEPS

Given the current position into which physics places non-dominant students, it would seem imperative that action be taken to redress the imbalance. Hopefully, physics education would open dialogue with students about the under-representation of women in physics, which, as Lock and Hazari (2016) demonstrated, positively affects students’ physics identities and increases the likelihood that they might enter the field. However, the precise types of changes that may occur in students’ thinking and identities during these discussions have not been established. In addition, while recognition of students’ competence is a critical element of their physics identity formation, the forms that this recognition may take and the frequency with which it need occur are not well known. Though the interplay between students’ backgrounds and the modes of teaching employed by their instructors has been documented, this area also warrants further investigation with respect to other intersectional aspects of their identities, such as socio-economic class. Finally, much of the data that has been generated by these studies relies on students’ beliefs and intentions about whether or not they will continue to study physics in the future. A fruitful line of inquiry would be to follow secondary students in a long-term study to determine whether or not they follow through with their intentions.

Despite the researchers’ varied lines of inquiries, this review has demonstrated that identity is a research lens well worth considering. The construct of identity allows scholars to ask difficult questions about the nuanced aspects of non-dominant students’ experiences with physics. Hopefully the answers they find will enable us to improve the way that physics is taught and change the culture of physics so that future students see a place for themselves in it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to my supervisor, Allison Gonsalves, for helping me select the topic for this analysis and for her guidance during the writing process. I am also grateful for the careful reading done by Philippa Parks and for her many useful suggestions. I also wish to acknowledge the helpful contributions of Bronwen Low, Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang, and Marta Kobiela, who provided feedback on an early version of this manuscript.

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