- 140 Commonwealth Ave.
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 - 617-552-3902
Stanton Wortham
Boston College, Lynch School of Education, Department Member
- University of Pennsylvania, Education, Culture and Society, Faculty Memberadd
- Philosophy, Education, Anthropology, Sociology, Communication, Languages and Linguistics, and 18 moreCultural Theory, Culture, Semiotics, Philosophy of Education, Immigration, Linguistic Anthropology, Social and Political Philosophy, Language and Culture, Language in Society, Educational Philosophy, Immigration and identity (Anthropology), Latina/o immigration, Culture and Language, Immigration (Anthropology), Sociolinguistics, Scales, Discourse Analysis, and Narrativeedit
- An award-winning teacher, scholar, and documentary film producer, Stanton E. F. Wortham, Ph.D., comes to the Lynch Sc... moreAn award-winning teacher, scholar, and documentary film producer, Stanton E. F. Wortham, Ph.D., comes to the Lynch School of Education as its inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where he was the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor and associate dean for academic affairs.
A linguistic anthropologist and educational ethnographer with a particular expertise in how identities develop in human interactions, Wortham has conducted research spanning education, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than 80 articles and chapters that cover a range of topics including linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, “learning identity” (how social identification and academic learning interconnect), and education in the new Latino diaspora.
He spent 18 years as a professor and administrator at Penn, where he served twice as interim dean of the Graduate School of Education and won multiple awards for teaching excellence, including the University of Pennsylvania Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.
For the last 10 years, Wortham has studied the experiences of Mexican immigrant students both in and outside of school as they adjusted to lives in communities with largely non-Latino populations.
As part of that project, he was the executive producer of the award-winning 2014 documentary Adelante, which chronicles how a Mexican-immigrant and Irish-American community are revitalizing a once-struggling parish. Wortham is currently writing a book based on his research in the small town.edit
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Education is not a discipline, but a phenomenon. We conceptualize education as a fuzzy set of processes that occur in events and institutions that involve both informal socialization and formal learning. Various objects are constructed in... more
Education is not a discipline, but a phenomenon. We conceptualize education as a fuzzy set of processes that occur in events and institutions that involve both informal socialization and formal learning. Various objects are constructed in educational processes, like the identities of teachers and learners, the subject matter learned and the social structures produced and reproduced. These objects are constructed through mechanisms that involve various levels of organization, including psychological, interactional, cultural and social elements. Constructionist approaches to education are important because they can help educators understand and change the highly enabling and constraining outcomes that educational processes have. Constructionist inquiries illuminate how learners\u27 identities and competence, distinctions between valued and devalued subject matter, and the social organization of schooling are constructed, and in so doing they may help education better achieve its trans...
Research Interests:
The COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented public health emergency, challenged higher education and threatened students’ well-being in several ways. With the abrupt shift to online learning, were inst...
Research Interests:
The COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented public health emergency, challenged higher education and threatened students’ well-being in several ways. With the abrupt shift to online learning, were inst...
Research Interests:
We argue that ‘academic language’ should not be understood as technical components associated with a ‘register’, and that instead we must attend to its enregisterment. Enregisterment relies upon la...
Research Interests:
Purpose: Educational approaches that advocate “well-being,” the “whole child,” “social and emotional learning,” “character,” and the like emphasize human development beyond the acquisition of knowledge and skills. These approaches vary... more
Purpose: Educational approaches that advocate “well-being,” the “whole child,” “social and emotional learning,” “character,” and the like emphasize human development beyond the acquisition of knowledge and skills. These approaches vary widely in their views of human nature, their visions of a good life, and their prescriptions for educational practice. This article maps out heterogeneous contemporary approaches to “well-being” and related constructs, thereby allowing researchers, educators, and policymakers to understand the divergent assumptions made by the proliferating approaches to education that go beyond academics. Design/Approach/Methods: This article presents results from a 2-year project, which included interviews with advocates of different approaches and review of key literature about eleven educational approaches to “well-being,” the “whole child,” “social and emotional learning,” “character,” and similar noncognitive ends. Findings: The article argues that any education...
Research Interests:
This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western... more
This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds high-stakes testing. We describe how practices that focus heavily on testing mold children into autonomous, rational individuals while marginalizing those who don’t fit this model. Adhering to these practices and naturalizing the Enlightenment subject limits educators’ ability to serve students who resist the normative practices of schooling.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Abstract Drawing on data from ten years of ethnographic research in a New Latino Diaspora town, this article analyzes how heterogeneous resources become relevant to the social identification of one Latina middle school girl as sexually... more
Abstract Drawing on data from ten years of ethnographic research in a New Latino Diaspora town, this article analyzes how heterogeneous resources become relevant to the social identification of one Latina middle school girl as sexually promiscuous. We describe how the focal girl, her parents, teachers, family members, and peers mobilize resources from several different scales as they position her. Following Latour (2005) and drawing on linguistic anthropological accounts of heterogeneous resources across scales (Agha, 2007; Wortham, 2012), we describe the networks and trajectories across which one identity is produced.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Sociology and Narratives
Research Interests:
This essay explores the question of relevant scale: which of the many potentially relevant processes – from interactional through local through global, from nearly instantaneous through those emergent over months, years or centuries – in... more
This essay explores the question of relevant scale: which of the many potentially relevant processes – from interactional through local through global, from nearly instantaneous through those emergent over months, years or centuries – in fact contributes to social identification in any given case, and how do these heterogeneous processes interrelate? Contemporary answers to this question have moved beyond the détente of the “micro-macro dialectic,” in which purportedly homogeneous “macro” processes constrain events and actions, while being simultaneously constituted by “micro” events and actions. We review contemporary work on these issues, with particular reference to the use of language in social identification, and we argue that an adequate account must go beyond “micro” and “macro.” We illustrate our argument with data from a seven-year ethnographic project in an American town that has received thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past decade, focusing on two types of narrat...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Graduate School of Education GSE Publications University of Pennsylvania Year 1996 Voicing on the News: An Analytic Technique for Studying Media Bias Stanton Wortham * Michael Locher "ï * University of Pennsylvania,... more
Graduate School of Education GSE Publications University of Pennsylvania Year 1996 Voicing on the News: An Analytic Technique for Studying Media Bias Stanton Wortham * Michael Locher "ï * University of Pennsylvania, stantonwugse.upenn.edu T University of Chicago, ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Human activity involves interconnections among civic, social, emotional, ethical, spiritual, and intellectual aspects. Recent advocacy for “whole person” education suggests that educators should attend to these multiple dimensions, but it... more
Human activity involves interconnections among civic, social, emotional, ethical, spiritual, and intellectual aspects. Recent advocacy for “whole person” education suggests that educators should attend to these multiple dimensions, but it does not provide an account of integration, of what “wholeness” means. We argue that those who facilitate development should encourage mutually reinforcing interconnections among various aspects of the individual, as well as interconnections among individual dispositions and social practices. Wholeness involves a jointly individual/social process of orchestrating others’ voices so as to develop normative stances in changing contexts that demand ongoing adjustment.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented public health emergency, challenged higher education and threatened students’ well-being in several ways. With the abrupt shift to online learning, were instructors able to maintain a focus on... more
The COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented public health emergency, challenged higher education and threatened students’ well-being in several ways. With the abrupt shift to online learning, were instructors able to maintain a focus on educating whole students, in addition to teaching subject matter? We answer this question by investigating “formative education,” an approach to teaching and learning that emphasizes holistic development, exploring formative education online during the pandemic. This qualitative study investigates the strategies of 37 college faculty who provided successful formative education online. A cross-subject analysis of data from faculty interviews and supplemental materials (course artifacts, course evaluations, student interviews) uncovered three teaching approaches that faculty used to achieve formative education online: empathic (centering students’ emotions), reflective (facilitating deep inquiry), and adaptive (having flexibility in meeting students’ needs). These approaches could help instructors design online education that engages the whole person.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Young, low-income, African American fathers have been at the center of research, practice, and policy on families over the past decade. This article uses a “voicing” analytic technique to examine identities among young, lowincome, African... more
Young, low-income, African American fathers have been at the center of research, practice, and policy on families over the past decade. This article uses a “voicing” analytic technique to examine identities among young, lowincome, African American fathers living in an urban setting; the intersections of these identities; and the fathers’ perceptions of the influences of familial, peer, and legal systems as barriers and resources in their development as fathers and the sustainability of their fathering roles. The primary questions addressed urban fathers’ representations of their transition to fatherhood, intergenerational relationships, transformative events, and visions of a possible self. Results from a survey, focus groups, and interviews suggest that the fathers seek to reinvent themselves and reconstruct their identities by separating from street life, redefine home as a place of stability, and challenge the practices of social and legal systems that appear to work against thei...
Research Interests:
Education is not a discipline, but a phenomenon. We conceptualize education as a fuzzy set of processes that occur in events and institutions that involve both informal socialization and formal learning. Various objects are constructed in... more
Education is not a discipline, but a phenomenon. We conceptualize education as a fuzzy set of processes that occur in events and institutions that involve both informal socialization and formal learning. Various objects are constructed in educational processes, like the identities of teachers and learners, the subject matter learned and the social structures produced and reproduced. These objects are constructed through mechanisms that involve various levels of organization, including psychological, interactional, cultural and social elements. Constructionist approaches to education are important because they can help educators understand and change the highly enabling and constraining outcomes that educational processes have. Constructionist inquiries illuminate how learners' identities and competence, distinctions between valued and devalued subject matter, and the social organization of schooling are constructed, and in so doing they may help education better achieve its tran...
Linguistic anthropologists investigate how language use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural context (Silverstein, 1985; Duranti, 1997; Agha, 2006). Theories and methods from linguistic anthropology have been... more
Linguistic anthropologists investigate how language use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural context (Silverstein, 1985; Duranti, 1997; Agha, 2006). Theories and methods from linguistic anthropology have been productively applied in educational research for ...
Culturally relevant pedagogy uses students' home cultu res as a resource, both to teach the standard curriculum more effectively and to develop students' pride in those home cultures. This article describes how culturally relevant... more
Culturally relevant pedagogy uses students' home cultu res as a resource, both to teach the standard curriculum more effectively and to develop students' pride in those home cultures. This article describes how culturally relevant pedagogy gets a ppropriated in practice by teachers and students. The second author designed and ran an ESL room for three years, as part of a pull-out bilingual education program for a small group of Latino high school students in rural New England. She organized this room to match the more fluid spatiotemporal boundaries around activities that she had observed in many Latino homes. Her innovations succeeded in making Latino students feel more at home, but she only sometimes managed both to help her Latino students master the standard curriculum and to reinforce their pride in their home culture. Other school personnel, and some of the Latino students themselves, often perceived these as mutually exclusive options: either the Latino students would...
Research Interests:
Reprinted from Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 1, 2000, 2 pages. Copyright 2000 by the Regents of the University of California/American Anthropological Association. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to... more
Reprinted from Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 1, 2000, 2 pages. Copyright 2000 by the Regents of the University of California/American Anthropological Association. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the American Anthropological Association for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on AnthroSource (http://www.anthrosource.net) or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.
Research Interests:
This paper examines the relationship between verbal and visual semiotic cues by analyzing how semiotic cues position speakers interactionally and communicate implicit evaluative messages in one television news story. The paper summarizes... more
This paper examines the relationship between verbal and visual semiotic cues by analyzing how semiotic cues position speakers interactionally and communicate implicit evaluative messages in one television news story. The paper summarizes an analysis of this news story that my collaborator and I have done based solely on verbal cues (Wortham & Locher, 1996). Then the paper analyzes the visual cues that accompany this television news report. The research question is: Do the visual cues contribute to the interactional positioning accomplished by the verbal cues? The analysis shows that visual cues in this case both reinforce the interactional positioning that gets done by verbal cues and create a pattern of interactional positioning that is independent of the verbal cues. Comments Reprinted from International Journal of Applied Semiotics, Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2000, pages 131-141. Publisher URL: http://www.atwoodpublishing.com/journals/journal.htm This journal article is available at Sc...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This article describes how political and ethical positioning in classroom discussions can be intertwined with productive conversations about the subject matter. Discussions of compelling literature can involve a tight linkage between the... more
This article describes how political and ethical positioning in classroom discussions can be intertwined with productive conversations about the subject matter. Discussions of compelling literature can involve a tight linkage between the subject matter discussed and the ethical positions taken by students and teachers as they engage in productive classroom discussion. At the same time as they discuss literature in deliberate, rational, pedagogically productive ways, teachers and students also often adopt their own positions on political and ethical issues raised by the literature. This positioning is a form of action: it is not necessarily planned and sometimes not even conscious. This article illustrates such positioning, and shows how it can be interconnected with the subject matter, by analyzing one ninth grade English classroom discussion in an urban US high school. Comments Reprinted from Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, Volume 17, Issue 1-2, 2001, pages 47-64. Publis...
Research Interests:
After spending many years arguing about the nature of knowledge in the human sciences, Charles Taylor decided that the core disagreements were not epistemological but ontological. Instead of simply focusing on how people know (and on how... more
After spending many years arguing about the nature of knowledge in the human sciences, Charles Taylor decided that the core disagreements were not epistemological but ontological. Instead of simply focusing on how people know (and on how to know them), we must unearth our presuppositions about what people are. However, although knowledge and representational practices do not exhaust who we are, they are central to the human condition. How can we follow Taylor in shifting away from a knowledge-centered account of human nature, while nonetheless capturing how representation is central to many human activities? Comments Reprinted from Philosophy of Education 2001, 2001, pages 426-434. Publisher URL: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-yearbook/ This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/68 Representation and Action 426 P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 0 1 The Interdependence Of Representation And Action
A review of Ben Rampton (2006), Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Ben Rampton has a gift for identifying subtle discursive patterns that hook into and illuminate broadly relevant social processes. His earlier... more
A review of Ben Rampton (2006), Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Ben Rampton has a gift for identifying subtle discursive patterns that hook into and illuminate broadly relevant social processes. His earlier work on "language crossing" focused on moments when multiethnic British youth inserted forms from other languages into ongoing talk in English (Rampton, 2005). His new book describes three similar patterns: the appearance of popular cultural forms (especially music) in school, students' out-of-class use of forms from a foreign language learned in school and students' stylized use of social-class-stereotypical forms ("posh" and "Cockney") dropped into everyday discourse. By tracing these distinctive types of language use through a remarkable data set of recorded youth speech, Rampton is able to develop a precise, compelling empirical account. He then uses the data to explore questions of broad concern—about the cont...
In 1987, Lee Shulman and Hugh Sockett had an important exchange in the Harvard Educational Review. Shulman argued for the central role of knowledge in good teaching. Sockett responded that good teaching cannot be understood as primarily a... more
In 1987, Lee Shulman and Hugh Sockett had an important exchange in the Harvard Educational Review. Shulman argued for the central role of knowledge in good teaching. Sockett responded that good teaching cannot be understood as primarily a matter of knowledge and skills, because it centrally involves moral action in particular contexts. This essay sharpens the question of whether knowledge-based or action-based approaches make better sense of educational practice, by considering the power of classroom speech to communicate knowledge and to perform actions. The paper first describes M.M. Bakhtin’s dialogic theory of language use — which argues not only that speech simultaneously carries content and performs actions, but also that the two functions inevitably depend on each other. It then provides an example of the interdependence of knowledge and action in an excerpt of classroom conversation. The paper concludes that knowledge-based approaches underestimate how deeply knowledge and a...
School socializes children into institutional and academic practices. Because socialization occurs over time, it cannot be analyzed simply by describing typical speech events that occur in school. In addition, we must analyze trajectories... more
School socializes children into institutional and academic practices. Because socialization occurs over time, it cannot be analyzed simply by describing typical speech events that occur in school. In addition, we must analyze trajectories of events across which schoolchildren become different kinds of people. This paper analyzes the social identification that occurred in one ninth grade U.S. high school English and history classroom over an academic year, tracing events across which one student developed a distinctive social identity. The analysis attends to more widely circulating categories and practices, but also describes how these were contextualized and sometimes transformed both in the local classroom ecology and in particular events. The paper first describes a robust local model of gender identity, through which teachers and students identified the girls as academically promising and the boys as academically unpromising. It illustrates this model by showing how the prototyp...
Research Interests:
Globalization has brought rapid migration to many regions previously unfamiliar with immigration. In these changing landscapes long-time residents must make sense of their new neighbors, and immigrants must adjust to hosts’ ideas about... more
Globalization has brought rapid migration to many regions previously unfamiliar with immigration. In these changing landscapes long-time residents must make sense of their new neighbors, and immigrants must adjust to hosts’ ideas about them and develop their own accounts of a new social context. How immigrants are viewed and how they view themselves have important implications for their future prospects-especially in schools, where students are measured against normative models of success. Yet as members of cultural and linguistic minority groups, and often as people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, immigrant students may not be aware of these models that are typically part of the implicit or hidden curriculum. Realizing this, secondary school educators in one American town tried to help immigrant students adopt a normative model of identity, the «university-bound student,» by teaching them explicitly how such a person should behave. Their well-intentioned efforts at teaching t...
In this paper, we analyze a newscast for the narrative perspectives within it, using the work of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin on voicing. A Bakhtinian analysis of a newscast offers a richness rarely found in studies of media bias, for... more
In this paper, we analyze a newscast for the narrative perspectives within it, using the work of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin on voicing. A Bakhtinian analysis of a newscast offers a richness rarely found in studies of media bias, for reasons we discuss in the body of the paper. Our question is not, "How do we eliminate perspectival news reporting?" (which is impossible), but "How do we analyze perspectives in the news?" and "Why does news reporting nevertheless seem objective?" Comments Suggested Citation: Locher, M.A and Wortham, S. (1994). "The Cast of the News". Pragmatics, Volume 4, Issue 4, December 1994, pages 517-533. Publisher URL: http://ipra.ua.ac.be/ This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/105 Pragmatics 4:4.517 -533 International Prasmatics Association THE CAST OF THE NEWS] Michael A. Locher Stanton E.F. Wortham
© SAGE Publications, Inc. The final, definitive version of this article has been published in: Wortham, Stanton Reviews: Redefining Psychology Methodologically, Metatheoretically, Pedagogically, and Ethically BENJAMIN BRADLEY, Psychology... more
© SAGE Publications, Inc. The final, definitive version of this article has been published in: Wortham, Stanton Reviews: Redefining Psychology Methodologically, Metatheoretically, Pedagogically, and Ethically BENJAMIN BRADLEY, Psychology and Experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 256 pp. ISBN 0 521
Research Interests:
In "Resuscitating the Place of Educational Discourse in Anthropology," Bradley Levinson (1999) argues that cultural anthropology could benefit from research on education and that education could benefit from research on... more
In "Resuscitating the Place of Educational Discourse in Anthropology," Bradley Levinson (1999) argues that cultural anthropology could benefit from research on education and that education could benefit from research on anthropology as well. He describes how contemporary cultural anthropologists, following a "cultural studies" focus on media, have not attended sufficiently to the roles schools play in cultural production and reproduction. He makes a strong case that topics of central interest to cultural anthropologists like globalization, post-coloniality, and the cultural production of identity, could be illuminated by research on educational contexts and processes.
Research Interests:
More and more Latinos are moving to areas of the US where few Latinos have settled before a migration that has been called "the new Latino diaspora" (Hamann, 1999; Villenas, 1997). This paper describes an isolated community of... more
More and more Latinos are moving to areas of the US where few Latinos have settled before a migration that has been called "the new Latino diaspora" (Hamann, 1999; Villenas, 1997). This paper describes an isolated community of about two hundred Latinos, located in a small rural Northern New England town that I call Havertown. When I knew them in the mid-1990s, almost all community members were Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans who had lived in or passed through South Texas, whose families had at some recent point been involved in migrant agricultural labor, and who came from rural working-class backgrounds. Over the prior ten years they had been recruited to Havertown to work at a local meat processing plant. Comments Copyright 2001. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Published in Education in the New Latino Diaspora: Policy and the Politics of Identity, edited by Stanton Wortham, Enrique G. Murillo, Edmund T. Hamann (Westport, CT: Greenwo...
Research Interests:
The surging Hispanic and Latino population across the country has brought new education challenges and opportunities to rural and small town America.
Research Interests:
Drawing on data from ten years of ethnographic research in a New Latino Diaspora town,this article analyzes how heterogeneous resources become relevant to the social identification of one Latina middle school girl as sexually promiscuous.... more
Drawing on data from ten years of ethnographic research in a New Latino Diaspora town,this article analyzes how heterogeneous resources become relevant to the social identification of one Latina middle school girl as sexually promiscuous. We describe how the focal girl, her parents, teachers, family members, and peers mobilize resources from several different scales as they position her. Following Latour (2005) and drawing on linguistic anthropological accounts of heterogeneous resources across scales (Agha, 2007; Wortham,2012), we describe the networks and trajectories across which one identity is produced.
Research Interests:
A new Latino diaspora has seen the arrival of Spanish-speaking students in rural and suburban America--places that had not experienced Hispanic immigration in the way the Southwest and urban centers have. This new development presents... more
A new Latino diaspora has seen the arrival of Spanish-speaking students in rural and suburban America--places that had not experienced Hispanic immigration in the way the Southwest and urban centers have. This new development presents educators with challenges in meeting these students' needs. But educators also have the opportunity to draw on the skills and knowledge such students bring from home. The most successful solutions tend to be unique, rather than generalized.
This book describes an American town that became home to thousands of Mexican migrants between 1995-2016, where the Mexican population increased by over 1000% and Mexicans became almost a third of the town. We explore how the descendants... more
This book describes an American town that became home to thousands of Mexican migrants between 1995-2016, where the Mexican population increased by over 1000% and Mexicans became almost a third of the town. We explore how the descendants of earlier migrants interacted with Mexican newcomers, describing how experiences of and stories about migration unfolded across institutional spaces—residential neighborhoods, politics, businesses, public spaces, churches, schools, community organizations. We emphasize the ongoing changes in prior migrant communities and the interactions these groups had with Mexicans, showing how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways. The book richly represents the voices of Irish, Italian, African American and Mexican residents.
The book shows how Mexicans’ experiences were shaped by stories about the town’s earlier cycles of migration. Many Irish, Italian and African American residents narrated an idealized but partly accurate history in which their ancestors came as migrants and traveled pathways from struggle to success—“up and out” of the less desirable downtown neighborhoods. We trace how these stories were often inaccurate, but nonetheless influenced the realities of migrant life.
The town in which this ethnography took place represents similar communities across the United States and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. We must document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience in towns like this if we hope to respond intelligently to the politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.
The book shows how Mexicans’ experiences were shaped by stories about the town’s earlier cycles of migration. Many Irish, Italian and African American residents narrated an idealized but partly accurate history in which their ancestors came as migrants and traveled pathways from struggle to success—“up and out” of the less desirable downtown neighborhoods. We trace how these stories were often inaccurate, but nonetheless influenced the realities of migrant life.
The town in which this ethnography took place represents similar communities across the United States and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. We must document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience in towns like this if we hope to respond intelligently to the politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.
Research Interests: Mexican Studies, Actor Network Theory, Migration, Migration Studies, Sociology of Migration, and 11 moreMigration (Anthropology), International Migration and Immigration Policy, Educational studies, New Destinations, Anthropology and Education, Migration Narratives, New Migrant Destinations, Narratives of migration, Latino Diaspora, New Latino Diaspora, and sociology and anthropology of education
Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews... more
Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews with residents, the book focuses on key educational, religious, and civic institutions that shape and are shaped by the realities of Mexican immigrants. Focusing on African American, Mexican, Irish and Italian communities, the authors describe how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways and draw links between the town’s earlier cycles of migration. The town represents similar communities across the USA and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The purpose of the book is to document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience and to suggest ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators and communities can respond intelligently to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College.