Events

March 4th, 2020

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., Sparks 7a

The Migration Studies Project would like to invite you to our upcoming meeting, which showcases several presentations that will be featured in a colloquium at the annual meeting for the Association of Applied Linguistics in Denver, Colorado. The panel centers on the integration of Applied Linguistics and Rhetoric/Composition Studies research, and advocates for the spatial and mobility turns in the teaching of writing. Please see the information below for the list of panelists that will be featured.

List of presenters:

Shannon McClellan Brooks “Theorizing Rhetorical Embodiment and Materiality in Situated Contexts: Creative Borrowings for Two Fields.”

Lupe Rincon-Mendoza “Text and Talk: Intersubjectivity as a Building Block for Writing Pedagogies in the Spatial Turn.”

Ray Rosas “Writing, Embodiment, and Materiality: A Case Study of Writing as Distributive Process.”

Lyana Sun Han Chang “Affect and the Writing Process: Graduate Student Journeys to Produce Good Writing.”

Valeriya Minakova “Once Upon a Time in a Far-Away Lab: Using Spatial Resources in a Research Story.”

Due to time constraints, presenters will be limited to 12-15 minutes each. We will reserve the last 30 minutes of the meeting for Q&A and suggestions as the panel prepares for AAAL 2020.

February 19th, 2020

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., Sparks 7a
Ruth Parrish Sauder
Title: Welcome Voices: An Immigrant Narrative Project in Lancaster, PA

Church World Service Lancaster’s Refugee Community Organizer and Ruth are in the midst of applying for a storytelling workshop given by The  Moth Community Partner program which will involve participants who have resettled in the Lancaster area as refugees, asylum seekers, or immigrants. The Moth values working with organizations involving participants marginalized by society, with past community partners including the Idao Office for Refugees, the Innocence Project, the Muslim Writers Collective, and New Women New Yorkers.  This presentation will describe The Moth Community Partner program offerings, application process, an overview of immigrant community contexts in Lancaster, and hopes for continued collaboration with participants post-workshop.

and

Karen Elizabeth Morris
Title: “This Paper Had Nothing to Do with Writing:” The Influence of Reading Comprehension on Two Teacher Candidates’ Use of Writing in a Secondary ELA Classroom.

In her presentation, Karen will present on her findings from two case studies she conducted for her dissertation. Broadly, Karen’s research focuses on how teacher candidates, Maria and Xavier, use writing in instruction when they taught a self-designed unit. This presentation will focus on how Maria and Xavier adjusted their teaching and use of writing because of the department’s curriculum, specifically the core novel they were required to have students read and analyze, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Students’ lack of comprehension of the novel changed how the teacher candidates’ used writing in the classroom, especially when preparing students for the required final assessment.  These findings raise questions about how to prepare teacher candidates to teach writing in a setting that commonly values reading and analyzing texts.

January 20th, 2020

12 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., Sparks 7a
Magdalena Madany-Saa
Title: Translingual Family Games

Family games are material, cultural objects that are produced and reproduced by families with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and which play an important role in shaping a positive attitude towards translingual practices. Family games are effective actants in decreasing hegemonic language ideologies and in promoting the value of linguistic diversity and a view of language as an asset. The field of family language policies considers particularly how families use and allocate language in the home and how their decisions have implications for cognitive development and educational achievement of the children (King, 2008). Family games matter for education but unlike in schooling environment, their meaning is impregnated by affect and family values. The data for this presentation comes from two mini-ethnographies conducted between 2018 and 2019 with two multilingual families who are residents in north-eastern USA.

January 22nd, 2020

12 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., Sparks 7a
Dr. Angela Reyes
Title: Indexicality in Interactions

The workshop will be led by Professor Angela Reyes of the City University of New York. She will lead a session titled, “Indexicality in Interactions.” She will walk the participants through an analysis of a videotaped interaction among multilingual STEM scholars. She will introduce and evaluate the possibilities in her approach to discourse analysis. The event will be held at Sparks 7a. Participation is open to everyone interested.

and

4 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., Foster Auditorium
Dr. Angela Reyes
Title: Southeast Asian figures in the postcolony and diaspora: Language, race, modernity

How is colonialism understood as persisting in the absence of formal colonial rule? How does this question become rooted in notions of language, race, and modernity? This talk considers questions of postcoloniality that connect across two decades of ethnographic research I conducted with Southeast Asian communities in the U.S. and the Philippines: from Southeast Asian refugee youth in Philadelphia to Filipino college students in Manila. I center on the “figure”—a Goffmanian concept much elaborated upon in linguistic anthropology. Exploring how my earlier conceptualizations of “stereotype” connect to more recent theorizations of “figure,” I highlight a methodological approach to studying how the formation and circulation of linguistic and social types function to reconstitute colonial hierarchies in the postcolony and diaspora.

November, 20th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., Sparks 7a
Dr. Kleber Aparecido da Silva
Title: From the aquarium to the open sea: critical perspectives in the education of portuguese teachers in Brazil

Nowadays, with the intensification of globalization, there is a substantive change in the world’s social, cultural, and linguistic landscape (BLOMMAERT; RAMPTON, 2011). In this scenario, there is a significant growth in Brazil of bilingual and international schools that have two or more languages of instruction. Among the bilingual education proposals found in the Brazilian context, the following stand out: indigenous bilingual education, bilingual education in immigration contexts, bilingual education for the deaf community, bilingual education for prestigious languages and bilingual education in border contexts (SILVA et. al., 2019; LIBERALI and MEGALE, 2011). Added to this, we see an intense flow of immigrants entering the national scene, which has led to an even greater expansion of Brazilian multilingualism. Focusing on the context of bi/multilingual education for schools (from the Basic level, Technological Technician to Higher Education), there is still very little research to provide subsidies for a better understanding of the profile of educators and the most appropriate training of professionals working in these contexts. In this presentation, I focus on themes in the pedagogical making of the educator who works in these contexts, contribute to increase the understanding about important aspects that characterize this professional, and, consequently, about which skills, knowledge and (multi)literacy are necessary and which parameters could (re)orient their education for teaching and research. I believe that the delineation of these theoretical-methodological principles may be a driving force for the (trans)formation of critical agents capable of contributing to substantial changes in language education in Brazilian public schools (SILVA and JORDÃO, 2019; PESSOA, SILVESTRE and MONTE-MÓR, 2018; SILVA and ARAGÃO, 2015). In other words, we aim to leave the aquarium theoretically and praxiologically and enter with all our might into the open sea through research in the area of Critical Applied Linguistics (SILVA, 2019; PENNYCOOK and MAKONI, 2019; CANAGARAJAH, 2019; 2013).

and

Frances Nebus Bose
Title: The Tensions of Language Making with Google (Mis)Translate:  Engaging Across Screen and Linguistic Borders

This presentation explores the enormous potential in opening and making more visible the process of machine translation in classrooms with young emergent bi/multilingual children.  An example from a second-grade writing classroom is analyzed from the presenter’s fifteen-month ethnographic study in a linguistically diverse classroom.  In this analysis, translation is theorized not only between textual language pairs, but occurring on and off the page and screen. Informed by the concepts of “intra-action” (Barad, 2007) with Translingualism (Canagarajah, 2013) comprised of resources that are semiotic (van Leeuwen, 2005) and mobile (Blommaert (2010), this presentation discusses how enacting or making language between software, hardware, Google Translate neural network, teacher, and emergent bi/multilingual children, created a moment of translation where participants dynamically transformed each other into different ways of engaging. I demonstrate how frictionally working with these seemingly incompatible theories makes possible recognizing a generative pathway that propelled a continued experimentation with the tablet and Google Translate despite the risk of mistranslations and not understanding. The presentation concludes with connections to classrooms with young children.  Particularly, what opportunities can be recognized and cultivated in classrooms beyond focusing on the perhaps tidier immediate translation of language, but rather the messy in-tension connecting in language.

November, 06th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., Sparks 7a
Isaac Bretz
Title: Dis/entangling the glocalization of ESL Group Bible Study

October, 23rd, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., Foster Auditorium
Dr. Cristina Sanchez-Martin
Title: Self-reflexivity and praxis in the study of translingual and transnational writing pedagogies

This presentation is an account of a researcher’s trajectory to investigate the teaching of writing from a translingual and a transnational lens as informed by two institutional environments. Using identity as pedagogy (Motha, Jain, & Tecle, 2012) and identity as activity (Lee, 2013), I trace the trajectory of a descriptive research project into an impact study. First, I investigated teachers’ understandings and doing of language in the writing classroom when the programmatic activity systems required them to integrate translingual approaches to writing. Teachers’ practices in the classroom reflected the significance of tying and untying knots that both students and teachers experience as they bring different activity systems together (Fraiberg, Wang, & You, 2017, p. 49). Therefore, my second study aimed to investigate if creating space (through awareness of activity) for teachers to explicitly engage in knotworking facilitates translingual and transnational writing pedagogies. Finally, I discuss the praxis emanating from this work as the research continues to grow.

October, 09th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., Sparks 7a
Eunice Ying Ci Lim
Title: Literary Representations of Illegitimate Tongues in Singapore: Reader Recognition and Reception

While linguists have rigorously investigated the social implications of Singapore’s language policies, little has been done to study the representation of these marginalized languages in local literature and how they reflect, respond to, or resist these language policies. Approaching literary representations of these languages from a new literacy perspective, my study assesses the ability of Singaporean and Singapore-based readers to comprehend these languages as they are represented in literature, and investigates comprehension alongside various factors including age, education level, and attitude towards these languages. Singapore-based participants were asked to participate in a two-part survey on literary representation of vernacular languages in Singapore. I argue that in identifying the many disparities between language positions and marginalized vernacular comprehension (MVC), a prevailing linguistic disquiet among Singaporeans is made palpable and literature’s attempts to play a role in negotiating and mediating language policies can be better understood.

and

Miso Kim and Heejin Lee
Title: Language Competence of International STEM Scholars

We will analyze data from MSP’s ongoing project on the communicative practices of international STEM scholars. The analysis will examine video transcripts to explore their interactions in research group meetings. 

September, 25th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., Willard 258
Amin Davoodi
Title: Immigration and Bilingual Education in a Post-War Context: From Promoting Social Equity to Cultural Cringe in Kurdistan Region of Iraq

In post-war Iraq, to cater to the new discourse on globalization and international relation and to address the growing trend of learning English for immigration purposes, a plethora of Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) programs emerged in Kurdistan region of Iraq with a proclivity towards one-way immersion. Such DLBE programs claim to promote equity for Kurdish minority children. Therefore, this study investigates (1) how DLBE programs in the Kurdistan region of Iraq promote equity for minority Kurdish children and (2) how one-way language immersion programs affect the attitudes of Kurdish minority children towards their heritage language and culture. The data of this study came from 120 written reflections by 40 students describing their attitudes towards English language and culture in three periods of time, semi-structured interviews with twelve teachers and five administrators, national bilingual policies and schools’ curricula. Through policy and curriculum analysis, thematic analysis of the students’ reflections and narrative inquiry, we found that DLBE programs promote equity for Kurdish minority children by (1) providing more educational and professional opportunities, (2) improving students’ communication and social skills and (3) creating opportunities for international academic collaboration. However, the results of the study further revealed that adopting western curriculum and overexposure to the target language and culture cause cultural cringe, subtractive bilingualism, and identity conflict through the hegemonic imposition of the English language.

September, 11th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., Willard 258
Layli Maria Miron
Title: Reframing Immigration through Religious Advocacy: Rhetoric, Cosmopolitanism, and the Divine

My dissertation project responds to an urgent rhetorical problem in the United States: the resurgence of nativist discourse. In recent years, nativism has propelled both state-sponsored and vigilante violence against immigrants. It apparently wields greater persuasive power than cosmopolitanism, a theory holding that ethical obligations do not stop at the borders of one’s ethnicity or nation-state. Since cosmopolitanism has not proven convincing beyond the academy, I look for spiritual supplements: I look to religion, which provides a uniquely persuasive appeal—divine guidance—and which continues to influence the lives of most Americans. What resources can religious rhetoric provide to pro-immigrant arguments in the contemporary United States? In my presentation, I will draw from two case studies of faith-based immigration advocacy (Catholic and Islamic) to explore that question.

and

Jade Sandbulte
Title: Perceptions of English Among International Sojourners

Although many prominent scholars have made strong arguments about the fallacy of the native English speaker, the idea of nativeness still has a strong hold among many English teachers and learners. For this data session, we will discuss excerpts from interviews with international spouses and visiting scholars that show the participants’ views of native vs. non-native speakers of English, different varieties of English, and the importance of English in their lives. The majority of the time will be spent discussing together how these perspectives relate with the current arguments in the field on these topics.

April, 19th, 2019

02:30-04:00 pm, Foster Auditorium
Dr. Anjali Sahay
Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Gannon University, Erie, PA.
Title: Skill Gap and Brain Drain for United States: Impact of Trump Executive Order on H1B and India

True to his campaign promises, President Trump started about the overhauling of the immigration laws in the country within a hundred days into his presidency. Within the range of executive orders one of the orders Trump signed was on stricter enforcement and review of the H1-B visa – popular in the technology industry to bring “highly skilled” foreign workers into the United States, typically at a price advantage. With these immigration laws under revision, India would be adversely impacted as one of the prime beneficiaries of the H1-B visas. Furthermore, under the Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” initiative, thousands of mostly Indian skilled workers with H1-B visas could be deported while they wait for their green cards to be granted under a proposal that President Donald Trump is considering. Additionally, work permits granted the spouses of H1-B to under the Obama administration since 2015 could be done away with negatively impacting the technology industry in the United States that relies heavily on its foreign H1-B visa population to populate the jobs. In this paper, I will be exploring the impact of this order, or even its consideration on H1B visa holders from India as well as an impact on the technology industry in the United States. Larger question whether such measures would necessarily lead to more hiring of American workers or lead companies to outsource its tech jobs will be considered. Lastly, with the Department of Homeland Security considering new regulations that would prevent H1-B visa extensions and create a sort of ‘self- deportation’ of hundreds of thousands of Indian tech workers in the United States, would this potentially lead to a skill gap and a “Brain Drain” for the United States itself.

April, 3rd, 2019

12:00-01:00 pm, 7 Sparks Building
Dr. Sharon Sharmini Danarajan
A visiting scholar from University Putra Malaysi
Title: Heritage vs. English: Uncovering the Shifts in Malaysia Indian Diaspora

One of the concerns that arises among diaspora communities is the shift from heritage languages towards dominant languages. One such country which faces this phenomenon is Malaysia, being home to the Malaysian Indian diaspora which consists of Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam speakers. Diasporic Indian languages in Malaysia are unique and distinguishable from their heritage variants in their homeland. Past studies have indicated that stronger languages tend to dominate over minority languages in multilingual communities due to factors such as economics, politics, education and religion, and Malaysia in not an exception. It can therefore be deduced that the survival of diasporic languages in Malaysia is at risk of shifting in favor of English. Therefore, a study was designed to identify the language choices of Malaysian Indians, the factors that affect their choices and how English ultimately contributes to language shift among them. A pilot study (n=30) was conducted in a state of Penang and the data was elicited via a questionnaire adapted from Yeh et al. (2004). Further, a domain analysis focusing on family, friendship, educational and transactional contexts was employed, and analyzed descriptively in accordance to Fishman’s Domain Analysis (1964). In the family domain, the findings of this study revealed that there was a drastic shift to English when participants spoke to their children (93%) and their spouses (63%) as opposed to the older generations. Meanwhile, in the friendship domain, 76% of the participants preferred using English when they had to speak to fellow Malaysian Indians. As for acquaintances/strangers, there was a 50-50 distribution between English and Bahasa Malaysia (the national language) between these participants. These preliminary findings seem to show that most families shifted from their heritage languages to English in interactions among children in the family domain and in friendship domain. I will discuss the driving factors behind the shift of heritage languages to English in Malaysia and the implications for the diaspora community

March, 22nd, 2019

02:30-04:00 pm, Foster Auditorium
Dr. Scott Kiesling
Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at University of Pittsburgh
Title: The Enregisterment of Affective-Discursive Practice: Gender/Sexual Identities

Wetherell (2013) suggests that we use the idea of affective-discursive practice – the emergence of affect in interaction among speakers – to productively bring affect into interactional analyses. Wetherell argues against understanding affect as a primitive which is merely represented by language, arguing that affective practice is an intersubjective, collaborative achievement accessible to analysts such that “affect and discourse are indissolubly and tightly woven together” (2013:364). I ask whether and how such affects accumulate in and across interactions. Most importantly, can the notion of affect help us understand the relationship between language and gender/sexual identity? I demonstrate the use the notion of affective-discursive practice to address these questions. I argue that a recognizable affective practice is part of what gets enregistered (Agha 2007) when characterological figures of gender/sexuality emerge. I use multiple cultural artifacts and interactions to argue that the kind of language enregistered with the enregistered US Anglo identities of the ‘Bro’ and the ‘Gay Man’ is related to the affects enregistered with them. Through these brief analyses, I suggest a path to entangling affect with other analyses of practice and enregisterment in language, such that the affects of identities sweep up the language with them and help them spread.

March, 22nd, 2019

12:00-01:30 pm, Sparks 124
Dr. Scott Kiesling
Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at University of Pittsburgh

Please join the MSP’s fortnightly meeting to participate in Dr. Kiesling’s workshop on discourse analytic strategies for stance analysis. All participants are welcome to bring data they are currently working with, or are interested in examining from a sociolinguistic perspective. In this workshop, Dr. Kiesling will introduce and walk us through strategies for uncovering stancetaking in discourse by drawing from interactional sociolinguistic approaches to stance analysis (Du Bois, 2007; Kiesling, 2004; Kiesling, Fitzpatrick, Eisenstein, Pavalanathan, & Han, 2018).

February, 27th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Lupe Rincon-Mendoza
Title: The Role of Spatial Repertoires in Negotiating Stance in a Research Group Meeting

Negotiating stances with professionals and mentors is important to the socialization of scholars, particularly for international STEM scholars, who may be unfamiliar with power dynamics in American academic institutions. In Research Group Meetings (RGM) and other professional activities, sometimes statuses and roles are fluid, as participants are instructing and learning simultaneously. We consider how stances mediate the enculturation and professionalization of researchers in an RGM in microbiology. Stances are acts where people index sociocultural values by evaluating discursive figures in talk, proffering epistemic/affective assessments, and positioning each other (Jaffe, 2009; Kiesling, 2011). By studying how stances facilitate the co-construction of symmetrical/asymmetrical relationships in RGMs, we highlight their impact on scholars’ learning and mentoring experiences. Socialization models, such as communities of practice (CoP), have assumed that experts are egalitarian and accommodative, inadequately addressing the implications of inequalities (Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2015).

We also note that existing stance models rely on verbal resources and overlook the role of spatial repertoires. In a sequential analysis of RGMs, we contribute to stancemethodologies by demonstrating how diverse semiotic resources inform stances in the socialization of novice scholars. We complement language socialization scholarship by adopting fine-grained interactional analysis (Duff, 2011) to pinpoint how power relations emerge through scholars’ orientations towards verbal and semiotic resources in interpersonal stances. Members index mentor/learner positions regardless of seniority, where knowledge and expertise are fluid and shift from one person or party. Alternating between roles is subtle and sensitive, because it could harm a professional’s success or standing if stances are not affiliative. Furthermore, novices need support in cultivating strategies to facilitate changes in roles. We bring out the challenges and resources in these socialization experiences that are necessary for disciplinary/professional enculturation of scholars to develop professional support for international STEM scholars.

and

Valeriya Minakova
Title: Managing Space in the Communicative Competence of STEM Scholars: The Door and the RGM

A poststructuralist orientation to language has attempted to overcome the text/context distinction by treating space and artifacts as active participants in human communication rather than “an inert background for social practice” (Caronia & Mortari, 2015, p. 403). Scholars (Canagarajah, 2017; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015) illustrate how semiotic and spatial resources work as an assemblage to generate meanings in a situated activity. Communicative competence is then viewed as one’s ability to align these resources for successful communication (Canagarajah, 2017). This presentation analyzes the interaction between human actors, objects, and space in the Research Group Meetings (RGMs) of international microbiology scholars. Using video-recording of the RGMs, photos of the meeting room, and an interview with the focal participant from Korea, the presenters examine the management of space through the door, and the way it affects the participants’ interactions. We demonstrate that the focal participant’s communicative competence extends beyond verbal resources and includes artifacts and space. Since the management of space through objects is not often discussed in ITA programs and other language teaching pedagogies, we bring out the importance of addressing such competence.

February, 13th, 2019

12:00-01:00 pm, 7 Sparks Building
Dr. Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis
Assistant Professor of Art Education at Penn State University
Teaching English as a Second Language at California State University
Title: Decolonial Storied Cartography: Refugee Youth-led Mobile Media in Action

This presentation is about an ethnographic account of the Karen tribe refugee youth-led mobile oral stories as a counter-cartography of Buffalo, NY. Their desire-based mobile storied cartography emerged from their dislocated/dispossessed experience in the U.S. colonial city, which explains their limited trajectory of daily lives. Their lived experience of the urban ghetto led to a community-initiative mobile drift in the city, which is viewed not merely as an opportunity of learning about the city, but also, more importantly, as a potential to decolonize the existing European colonial cartography with their oral stories and site specific-bodily acts. Moving away from a damage-centered research, I adopt the desire-centered research to bring an alternative understanding of refugee youth in relation to the dislocated land where racial/class/ economic segregation is apparent. Drawing on critical race theory and critical geography and media studies, I will discuss the following questions:1) how is the relationship between geographic domination and the refugee girls? 2) How does the refugee girls’ mobile storied cartography as decolonial desire to create a subversive narrative to make their social lives visible? 3) How does their mobile app push against the boundaries of conventional understanding of refugee youth and what counts as art curriculum and pedagogy?

January, 30th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Jade Sandbulte
Title: Invisible Sojourners: Second Language Socialization Among International Spouses

My project adopts second language socialization (Duff, 2011) and communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as frameworks to analyze the experiences of international spouses.  As universities welcome increasing numbers of international students and visiting scholars, it is becoming more common for these individuals to bring family members such as spouses.  In general, these international spouses have not received much support from the university (De Verthelyi,1995; Teshome & Osei-Kofi, 2012), thus requiring the spouses to take the initiative if they wish to improve their fluency in the local language and establish social connections during their short time abroad.  This potentially creates a different experience in regards to language socialization compared with other populations, such as students who are given language and social opportunities or immigrants who intend to stay in the local country long term.  As part of my dissertation research, I have conducted interviews with 13 international spouses from 8 different countries in order to learn what steps they have taken to improve their English proficiency, how they establish social connections in the local community, and what obstacles they have encountered.  My results reveal the types of English competencies that are important for international spouses and what resources can aid in the process of second language socialization.

and

We will analyze data from MSP’s ongoing project on the communicative practices of international STEM scholars. The analysis will examine video transcripts to explore their communicative competence.

January, 16th, 2019

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Katie Maters
Title: A Teacher-Researcher Partnership on Global English and SLTE in Rural Nicaragua: Towards Implications for Critical Theory and Pedagogy

Like Mathew (2018), I draw on Kumaravadivelu’s (2006a, 2006b, 2016) explanation of method as an “operating principle” that shapes language education curriculum, materials, testing and training, and that also molds learner and teacher subjectivities “by assembling particular configurations of desire, shame, and practice” (p. 789). I present video- and audio-recorded data on one of three teacher participants involved in curriculum meetings, teacher education workshops, and co-teaching partnerships in a remote, northern Nicaraguan town. These teacher-researcher partnerships were fostered during my dissertation research on Global English at the LPP-SLTE interface, informed by critical theory and critical language teacher education. The participant in focus, a 45-year-old male teacher, initially began workshops by requiring long periods of time holding turns, interrupting, and using body language that demonstrated his resistance to elements in workshops that critiqued conventional teaching methods in light of the context of severe hardship in which the teachers taught, and promoted teaching as social practice and contextual. During our final discussions together months later, he demonstrates some notable shifts in his perspectives on method, but at the same time holds on to other values he deems imperative for language learning and teaching. I would like to explore the complications that this participant brought to light for critical theory and pedagogy, including intersectionalities of researcher and participant subjectivities through age, gender, class, and the NS-NNS dichotomy.

and

We will analyze data from MSP’s ongoing project on the communicative practices of international STEM scholars. The analysis will examine video transcripts to explore their communicative competence.

December, 5th, 2018

12 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Madhav Kafle
Title: Negotiating Academic Literacy in Mobility: Undergraduate Refugee Students’ Challenges in US Higher Education

Our classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse globally. Scholars in many disciplines including TESOL and applied linguistics have been exploring better pedagogies for multilingual students. Exploring the nature of academic literacy support for multilingual students is one among many strands in improving our pedagogies. While the most common academic literacy support for multilingual students in the US universities is for academic writing, building on Haneda (2014) and Wingate (2016) I argue in my dissertation that academic literacy should be conceptualized broadly as developing an ability for successful academic communication.

Using teacher research and multiple case studies, my dissertation explores literacy experiences of multilingual students from refugee backgrounds. Specifically, it analyzes three former Bhutanese refugee students’ academic literacy challenges and negotiations based mainly on observations, interviews, informal conversations, and classroom artifacts. The study has two major findings: first, providing support only in academic writing is inadequate in addressing refugee students’ challenges as they also have interactional and material challenges. Next, pedagogical and institutional affordances play a significant role in successful negotiation of such challenges as do the ideologies of students and their literacy sponsors. Therefore, refugee students would benefit more from multi-pronged literacy support that validates their multilingual identities and repertoires. My research contributes to socially sensitive pedagogy debatesin the “age of trans” (Hall, 2018)

November, 7th, 2018

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Naseh Shahri
Title: Trajectories of participation and academic discourse socialization

Research into academic socialization has recently started to attend to learner trajectories across events (Kobayashi, Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2017). Situated in this context, I present a work-in-progress involving 14 months of data tracking six international graduate students. I present findings relating to the trajectories of participation of three participants. The findings demonstrate that the participants’ models of academic communication develop through their varied experiences as they move through their trajectories, underscoring the importance of looking across tasks and contexts.  I also foreground issues of researcher positioning and reflect on how patterns of interaction between the researcher and the participants may relate to socialization.

and

Isabel Marson
visiting scholar in applied linguistics and assistant professor
Department of language studies
State University of Ponta Grossa-UEPG-Parana-Brazil
Title: MULTILITERACIES, TRANSLINGUAL PRACTICE AND ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: DECOLONIZING LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION IN BRAZIL

The diversity of coexisting peoples, cultures, knowledges and ways of knowing has been one of the main characteristics of the contemporary world, making the need to prepare teachers to deal with multiple literacies (MASNY, 2012), with several languages(CANAGARAJAH, 2013) and with cultural diversity (COPE; KALANTZIS, 2000) more urgent than ever. This is the background to this paper, based on preliminary findings of an in progress doctoral research in Brazil, whose main objective is to investigate how undergraduate students and professors perceive their classroom practices in a Portuguese-English Languag! e major. The field-data generation took place at a State-funded, tuition-free university in the south of Brazil, in 2017 and 2018. Cleared by the local ethics committee, the data was constructed through qualitative interpretive research. The participants were seven professors (out of a total of 8) from the initial English language teacher education program, plus twenty-one undergraduate students (out of a total of 22) in the last year of the same program. Data was generated via class observations, questionnaires and interviews. In this paper I will present and discuss partial results of the data analysis, which showed that both undergraduate students and their professors believed that developing multiliteracies and using a variety of semiotic modes to construct meaning in English classes was crucial to their education. However, they also expressed concerns r! egarding their own competence dealing with such issues, especially in the case of ELF, as they seem confused as to whether there is a need (or a possibility) to elect one specific variety of English to be taught/learned, whether the prominence of the “native speaker” construct still holds, whether the English used and taught is the same students learn and need for their teaching practices, plus other dilemmas this presentation will bring to the fore and hopes to discuss.

October, 19th, 2018

02:30-04:00 pm, Foster Auditorium
Dr. Caroline Vickers
Faculty Director of Graduate Studies and Professor of English, Applied Linguistics
Teaching English as a Second Language at California State University
Co-Director of the CSUBB center for Health Equity
Title: Language Normativity and Control: Spanish-Language Medical Consultations in a Southern California Community Clinic

The purpose of this talk is to examine communicative outcomes in language concordant Spanish-language medical consultations in Southern California, where English is the normative language used outside of the clinic. Scholarship has addressed the asymmetrical power relationship between the relatively powerful medical practitioner and the relatively powerless patient in the medical consultation (Peräkylä, 2002). Such power differentials are exacerbated for language minority patients (Martinez, 2008). I will discuss my findings related to language minority patients’ loss of control, and constructions of English language normativity based on a corpus of 50 audio-recorded medical consultations (∼100,000 words) involving Spanish-English bilingual medical providers and Spanish monolingual patients, as well as written field notes of interactions within these medical consultations. Findings indicate that patients lose control over their own identity construction in these consultations because of particular interactional moves that providers make. These interactional moves include providers taking control over patient narratives particularly through the use of repetition. Additionally, provider code-switching from  Spanish to English to animate powerful stances marginalizes Spanish monolingual patients, and provider code-switching to English with bilingual third-party family members renders Spanish monolingual patients as non-participants. Implications of the data presented include the need to consider how language ideology and ideologies about the capabilities of non-English speaking people in English dominant contexts affect language minority health care experiences.

October, 17th, 2018

12:00-01:00 pm, Sparks 133
Dr. Caroline Vickers
Faculty Director of Graduate Studies and Professor of English, Applied Linguistics
Teaching English as a Second Language at California State University
Co-Director of the CSUBB center for Health Equity

The data I will be presenting in this workshop is from a corpus of conversations and interviews with young adults from the Inland Empire region of Southern California, a highly linguistically diverse region. It contains relatively wealthy suburban communities, crime ridden cities, rural desert areas, as well as mountain resorts. Moreover, parts of the Inland Empire are considered to be suburban and exurban Los Angeles, which contains neighborhoods that are quite cosmopolitan, catering to an elite consumer culture. The young adults in this data live near and can easily see the glamour of Hollywood, expensive clothing, books, and music, but they have differential access depending on their financial situation. The gestalt of the Inland Empire, on the other hand, is certainly not cosmopolitan with its endless strip malls, tract housing, and commuter freeway culture. To collect this corpus of data, young adult researchers who live in the Inland Empire region recorded conversations with members of their peer groups and their family members and interviewed them. The corpus contains 70 such conversations from all parts of the Inland Empire with several ethnicities, languages, and income levels represented. In this workshop, we will analyze samples of this data through the lens of Agha’s (2011) commodity registers in an effort to understand the relationship between transnationalism, commodity, and identity.

October, 3rd, 2018

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Miso Kim
Title: The interfaces of Neoliberalism and English in the South Korean Job Market: Tales of Two Jobseekers

Since the neoliberal economic reform in late 1990s, South Korean jobseekers are expected to invest in earning high scores on English tests and developing oral English proficiency to secure jobs in the entry-level white-collar job market. Though this is widely recognized, there is a paucity of literature on how the jobseekers negotiate the demands of neoliberalism, and prepare for the tests and speaking skills accordingly (cf. Jang, 2015). In addition, there is even less research on how the jobseekers develop speaking skills without resorting to learning test-taking skills or studying abroad. In this presentation, I introduce a work-in-progress that aims to fill the research gap. I present a case study of how two jobseekers interpreted and negotiated the demands of neoliberalism, assigned professional and personal values on English, and how they designed their own ways of learning English to achieve their goals when they were given the opportunity to study English in a flexible setting.

September, 19th, 2018

4:00-6:00 pm, Foster Auditorium
Dr. Jo Angouri
Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK
A Visiting Distinguished Professor at Aalto University, School of Business, Finland
Title: Linguistic Penalty in the Workplace: Language Politics, Social Justice and Access to Work

In this talk I explore the complexities of transcending boundaries and crossing geographical, national and linguistic borders in relation to accessing work. I draw on current and completed projects on the needs of workplace newcomers and focus in particular on the barriers faced by those new to sociopolitical and linguistic ways of doing and talking work . I discuss the salient concept of linguistic penalty , the price newcomers pay when they are labelled as ‘different’ and fail to talk the way ‘we’ talk and sound the way ‘we’ sound. In the current context, fear-based narratives associate migration with pressures on the welfare system, loss of employment for the host society, crime and erosion of values that threaten the imagined homogeneity and perceived social cohesion. Hence, the workplace becomes a contested area, split between those who are ‘in’ and those who are attempting to gain access and are often commodified as a resource, brain power, knowledge worker, manual labour and/or a burden and threat. I close the paper with discussing the need for a new research agenda and provide directions for future studies.

September, 19th, 2018

12:00-01:00 pm, Willard 351
Dr. Jo Angouri
Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK
A Visiting Distinguished Professor at Aalto University, School of Business, Finland
Title: Metacultural discourse and (everyday) politics: Setting an agenda for researching the workplace

September, 5th, 2018

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building

Dr. Anna Kaiper
Title: (Re)Constructing Identities: South African Domestic Workers, English Language Learning, and Power

April 18th, 2018

12:00-1:30 pm, 7 Sparks

Miso Kim
Title: The promise of English in South Korean labor markets and the jobseeker’s journey to English

April 11th, 2018

2:00-3:30 pm, Foster Auditorium
Professor Junko Mori
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title: Text, talk and embodied practices: “Unpacking” handover notes for international workers at a Japanese healthcare facility

As a famously known aging country suffering from labor shortage, Japan started to recruit healthcare workers from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, through the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) established with the respective countries. Ten years into this program, however, the results have been mixed, largely because of the difficulty in providing rapid and effective language and culture training suitable for the professional purpose. The country also characterized as “a model case of successful language modernization” (Heinrich 2012) is at a critical juncture for reevaluating its language policies and education to meet the 21st century demands of the changing demographics.

In this presentation, I will share a preliminary analysis of video-recorded interactions between Japanese caregivers (kaigo-shi) and their international counterparts, and discuss how international healthcare workers and their Japanese colleagues are coping with the structural challenge caused by the EPA-based program. By adopting multimodal conversation analysis (CA) (Goodwin 2013; Mondada 2012, 2014; Streeck, Goodwin & LeBaron, 2011), the analysis explicates how the participants coordinate talk and embodied practices (pointing to documents, gesturing, nodding, gazing) to “unpack” information conveyed in shift handover notes in which specific instructions regarding each care-receiver and other announcements are shared. Through the process, I hope to demonstrate how multimodal institutional CA can enhance the understanding of communicative practices observed in workplace interaction. The presentation will also consider how divergent approaches in applied linguistics need to be brought together, not only to advance theory-building, but also to generate sound recommendations for practical interventions.

February, 28, 2018

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Dr. Stephen Looney
Title: Assemblage in Applied Linguistics: A Body without Organs

Recently, applied linguists have taken up the post-structural term “assemblage” from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Latour (2005). This paper investigates the Deleuzo-Guattarian conceptualizations of assemblage and the body without organs and how they might be applied to the analysis of video data. After introducing key terms, the paper attempts to construct a body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Moving from the strata of a conversation analysis study of undergraduate physics lab interactions to the plane of consistency, the paper explores three lines of flight: a side sequence, scientific vocabulary, and the unseen participants. On these lines of flight, we engage with questions about agency, power, epistemic authority, and research methodology. In the end, I will ask the audience to ask the question, “what does adopting post-structural theory mean for qualitative research methodology in applied linguistics?”

And

Frances Nebus Bose
Title: “Blogging Science: Young children becoming engaged in classroom literacies through ‘language’ intra-play”

Wednesday, February, 14, 2018

12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Title: English language volunteering in low-income countries – an attempt to have an alternative dialogue with rural teachers in Nicaragua

Short-term (3-12 months) Global North à Global South migration tends to occur through discourses of development and volunteerism. Mostafanezhad (2017) argues, “The concept of social development and its most common referent—English language education—demands further analysis” (p. 59), one reason being that the status of English as a key to socioeconomic mobility remains relatively unquestioned despite empirical evidence indicating English does not necessarily advance people in low-income countries most vulnerable to such promises (Coleman, 2011; May, 2014; Ricento, 2015). Jakubiak’s (2012) work problematizes a very popular form of volunteerism called, “voluntourism.” After a short discussion of her analysis of websites designed to attract young people to these short-term endeavors, she discusses her own data on volunteers during a short-term experience. Reading this article will allow us to critique data from my dissertation research, a six-month case study situated in rural, northern Nicaragua, that attempts to construct a critical, alternative practice to English teaching in the face of the powerful discourse of English as development. Although I am not a “voluntourist,” I am certainly a volunteer. Unlike the majority of people who engage in volunteer EFL in low-income countries, I also have a background in English teaching. Despite these differences, working within a critical, alternative discourse also needs to be critiqued for relevance, effectiveness, and possible consequences. In my dual role as volunteer-researcher, am I opening a new space for dialogue, or am I just complicating an already messy and unregulated EFL volunteer/voluntourist enterprise?

November 15, 2017

11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., 133 Sparks Building
Title: Presentation on research group meetings in STEM

We will begin with a discussion of an article on the social semiotics of space and its effect on the organization of human action before looking at some data collected by MSP . The article is entitled “The agency of things: how spaces and artifacts organize the moral order of an intensive care unit”. We will then discuss how research group meetings in STEM fields are organized through a look at our data

November 1, 2017

12:00 – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Title: Presentation by Dr. Shakil Rabbi

Teaching for Transfer of Dispositions in Writing Instruction

October 18th, 2017

12 – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building

 

Lunch hour meeting with Dr. Chritina Higgins, professor of second language studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

October 18th, 2017

4 – 5:30 p.m., 160 Willard Building

 

Lecture by Christina Higgins, professor of second language studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

October 4th, 2017

12 – 1:30 p.m., 7 Sparks Building
Title: Beyond Logocentrism: Analyzing Embodiment in L2 Use

Presenter: Dr. Stephen Looney

September 20th, 2017

11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., 133 Sparks Building
Title: Research group meetings, international scholars and spatial resources

In this meeting, we will lead a discussion on an article that looks at Goodwin’s article entitled “The co-operative, transformative organization of human action and knowledge”. The article will provide a springing board for an exploration of some relevant data collected by the MSP on research group meetings. We will then collaboratively consider the relevance of the reading for our data and how we can extend the theoretical concepts in light of the reading.

April 20th, 2017

5:00 p.m., 121 Sparks Building
Title: Distinguished lecture on “Language, Literature, and the Globalectic Imagination”

Presenter: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature and English, University of California, Irvine

Ngugi is a world renowned novelist and theorist of post-colonial literature, and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He has been short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ngugi has received honorary doctorates from about a dozen universities around the world. He has held distinguished teaching positions at Yale and New York University, after his early education and teaching in Kenya. He is respected for being one of the earliest scholars to envision a more critical and inclusive relationship between English and local languages in English studies. His literary and linguistic vision has been crafted through the painful personal history of education in a British colony and academic life in an authoritarian postcolonial country

Distinguished lecture on “Language, Literature, and the Globalectic Imagination” Flyer

March 29, 2017

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: Chinese heritage language classroom learning: Motivations, identities and trajectories

Presenter: Naseh Shahri, PhD Candidate, Applied Linguistics

This presentation reports on a case study investigating an ESL learner’s engagement with writing through the analysis of the participant’s writing samples, interviews and class observations. I will argue that the participant’s written displays of identity in his writing are best understood through the lens of sociolinguistic scales

—

Title: A qualitative inquiry of Japanese college students learning to use English as a lingua franca in Thailand

Presenter: Daisuke Kimura, PhD Candidate, Applied Linguistics

This session will revolve around my doctoral dissertation project. Since the context of research is novel, I will share some interview excerpts to find answers to exploratory questions, such as *why did they choose to go to Thailand? *and *what do they do outside the classroom and with whom?*

February 22, 2017

12:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: Chinese heritage language classroom learning: Motivations, identities and trajectories

Presenter: Chunyuan Di

This study attempts to understand how learners’ situated identities, motivations and linguistic practices are reciprocated through the language learning process. The data is based on a semester-long case study, collected through post-semester interviews and in-class presentations.

—

Title: Identity trajectories across time and space: The case of two emergent bilingual third graders

Presenter: Frances Nebus Bose

This presentation draws on data from a one-year classroom ethnography pilot study across different literary spaces in a public elementary school: writing workshop and morning meeting. Focusing on the literacy-related interactions and writings of two emergent bilingual third graders, this presentation will consider how these students negotiate who they want to be and who they can be in classroom literacy activities and their resultant identity trajectories.

January 25, 2017

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: Investigating ideologies of standardized English tests used in South Korean job markets

Presenter: Miso Kim

The data, collected through semi-structured interviews, report how South Korean jobseekers perceive standardized English tests in the job market and how they prepare for the tests to win over their competitors in the market.

—

Title: An NNEST’s trajectory of professional L2 teacher identity construction in the becoming of a teacher-researcher

Presenter: Seyma Toker

The data for this narrative inquiry primarily come from interviews conducted over two semesters and focus on the professional teacher identity (re)-construction of an English language teacher over her four and a half year teaching career both as an EFL teacher in Turkey and as a teaching assistant in graduate schools in the United States.

November 30, 2016

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: Movement and modeling in international teaching assistants’ mathematics lectures

Presenter: Katie Masters, PhD Candidate, Applied Linguistics

This discussion will center on data collected by our colleagues at the Center for Research on English Language Learning and Teaching (CRELLT) in the Department of Applied Linguistics. We will analyze video and transcript of two TAs, specifically focusing on the embodiment of their lecturing: the back-and-forth movements and motions, gestures, underlining, mapping, drawing, and connecting that make up their explanations and act as complementary communicative competences to their speech.

October 26, 2016

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: The Development of Individual Networks of Practice and Language Socialization

Presenter: Henry Chen, MA Candidate, Applied Linguistics

The research discussed today is based on interview data that records how a Chinese STEM-major graduate student becomes socialized into an English academic community. Data excerpts in the form of transcriptions and socialization mappings will be discussed.

September 28, 2016

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: Mobility, Graduate Students, and Academic Writing

Presenter: Katie Masters, PhD Candidate, Applied Linguistics

This discussion takes us through interview and writing data of a student migrant from Nicaragua who is studying in his L3/C3 Norwegian/Norway but writing assignments in his L2, English. We place particular focus on his use of resources and relationships as he navigates his writing assignments.

November 22, 2013

8:00 a.m. – 5:00p.m. Foster Auditorium
Title: Migration and Language
Conference Flyer 2013
Conference Schedule

April 10, 2013

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: TBA

Presenter: Patricia Seuchie, French, PSU-Altoona

March 13, 2013

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: TBA

Presenter: Hina Ashraf, AIR University, Pakistan

February 13, 2013

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: “De Facto Widows in Tajikistan: The Gendered Impacts of Labor Migration”

Presenter: Azita Ranjbar, Geography & Women’s Studies

January 16, 2013

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: “The Language of Race: Placing the Unsignified in Nineteenth Century Russian Court”

Presenter: Dr. Jessie Dunbar, Africana Research Center

March 14, 2012

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: “Everyday Strategies of Language Learning: African Skilled Migrants in English Dominant Countries”

Presenter: Madhav Kafle, Doctoral Candidate in Applied Linguistics

February 23, 2012

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Title: “Home is not one distinct face” – African skilled migrants’ constructions of identity

Presenter: Constantin Schreiber, Master’s Candidate in International Affairs, M.A. Linguistics and TESOL

September 13, 2011

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Topic: Skilled Migrants and Development

What development activities are skilled migrants (SMs) involved in in their home countries?
Are SMs part of any organized Diaspora professional groups focused on development work in their home communities?
Do SMs intend to return to their country of origin for development efforts?  Do they intend to return ultimately?
What factor does language play in development efforts?

October 11, 2011

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Topic: Skilled migrants and multilingualism

What role do different varieties and standards of English play?  What role do biases play?
To what extent do SMs make use of code-switching?
What language do SMs use in different settings (home/work/development/etc)
What are SMs perceptions and attitudes toward standards of English?
How do SMs see the role/dominance of English?
In what way does English shape the levels of success of SMs?
To what extent is English seen as a network standard?

November 8, 2011

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Topic: Skilled Migrants and Trajectories of Migration

What routes to SMs take to migrate in search of professional advancement?
Do SMs intend returning home?
To what extent do SMs shuttle back and forth between their home land and host communities?
How does English help SMs get access to jobs?
What is SM’s orientation to home?

December 6, 2011

12:00 p.m. – 1:00p.m. 7A Sparks Building
Topic: Skilled migrants’ and Educational Policy

To what extent has their home country prepared them well for the challenges they face in professional development abroad?
How do host community institutions prepare them well for their communicative and professional needs?
How do educational and language policies in home and host communities relate to the challenges SM face?
What are SMs attitudes toward English as a required subject in school?

Spring 2011: Lunch Hour Seminar

Apr 30, 2011
The following is the list of speakers for the lunch hour seminar in Spring 2011.

Note that we meet at noon for the talk and also have a light lunch. The seminars are typically held at 124 Sparks.

Spring Distinguished Lecture

Apr 20, 2011

Spring Distinguished Lecture 2011 Suzanne Romaine, Ph.D. Merton Professor of  English Language, University of Oxford, United Kingdom  “Identity, Migration, and Language” April 20 5:00 p.m. 117  Osmond

Fall 2010 Distinguished Lecture: Adrian Bailey

Dec 09, 2010

Head of Geography and Professor of Migration Studies, Leeds University; Dean of Social Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, will speak on “Labor Migration, Recession, and Transnationalization: Notes from Europe” on December 9th, 2010 at 104 Thomas at 6pm.
Download Attachment

Lunch Hour Seminars: Fall 2010

Dec 07, 2010
The following is the list of speakers and topics for the lunch hour seminars for Fall 2010. Note that all seminars start at noon on the dates specified below.

Lecture: Isabel Hofmyer

Oct 18, 2010
Isabel Hofmeyer, Professor of African  Literature, University of  Witwatersrand,  Johannesburg, South Africa, will speak on “Seeking Empire, Finding Nation:Gandhi and Indianness in South Africa”  on October 18, 2010 at 220 Osmond.
Download Attachment

SPRING DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: PROFESSOR SUSAN ROBERTSON

Apr 29, 2010
PROFESSOR SUSAN ROBERTSON Professor, Sociology of Education; and Coordinator, Center for Globalization Education and Societies at University of Bristol.

GUEST LECTURE: Rochona Majumdar

Feb 11, 2010
Rochona Majumdar, Ph.D. Assistant Professor at University of Chicago; Department of South Asian Languages and Literature. Topic: “The Past and Future of Postcolonial History.” February 11, 2010 5:00 p.m. 101 Chambers

SPRING 2010 Lunch Hour Seminars

Jan 19, 2010
The Migration Studies Project is organizing a lunch hour presentation and discussion on a Tuesday of each month.

FALL 2010 DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco

Nov 02, 2009
FALL 2009 DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
BY Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Ph. D.

(The Courtney Sale Ross University Professor at NYU Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
TOPIC: “Rethinking Immigration in the Age of Global Vertigo”
ON NOVEMBER 2ND 2009, 5.00 PM

Fall 2009 Lunch Hour Seminars

Sep 08, 2009
The Migration Studies Project is organizing a lunch hour presentation and discussion on the second Tuesday of each month in Fall 09.

The gathering is aimed at acquainting the university community with the work of colleagues in diverse departments, identifying areas of common scholarly interest, and building community. We hope to serve a light lunch during the gathering. We are planning to have a presentation for forty five minutes, followed by questions and discussion for fifteen minutes.

The venue is 124 Sparks Building.

The following are the topics and presenters:

Sept 8th: Sinfree Makoni (Department of Applied Linguistics): “Is a sociolinguistics of a diaspora feasible?”

October 13th: Brian Lennon (Department of English): “Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States.”

November 10th: Esther Prins and Blaire Willson Toso (Education). “Receptivity toward Immigrants in Rural Pennsylvania: Perceptions of English as Second Language Providers.”

December 8th: Alex Huang (Comparative Literature): “The Theatricality of Exile and Religious Rhetoric: Locating Gao Xingjian in the Chinese Diaspora.”

MIGRATION STUDIES PROJECT CO-SPONSORS VISIT BY GEORGE LAKOFF

Apr 26, 2009
The Burke Lecture

This year’s Burke Lecture will be given by George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Renowned for his work in cognitive linguistics, Lakoff has taken his expertise into the realms of politics, literature, ethics, philosophy, and mathematics.

He is the author of such well-known books as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think; Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind; Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being; Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate; The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain; and Metaphors We Live By.

Conference on Diaspora Communities: Diaspora and Language

Apr 10, 2009
By focusing on the transnational flow of people and languages, the conference will address its implications for domains as diverse as education, health, labor, law, media, and cultural representation. In addition to three keynote addresses by distinguished speakers, the conference will feature the research and scholarship of PSU’s own faculty members on these subject.

The conference will also organize an essay competition for undergraduates. The essay will elicit students’ narratives on their personal, family, and friendship networks across migrant settings through surveys and questionnaires. The winning essays will be read in a session, and contribute to a discussion.

Community organizations representing diverse ethnic groups in the region (i.e., Chinese, Hispanic, and Russian) will also be asked to participate in a panel open to the public and preferably held outside the university. They will share their concerns related to health services, law, education, and cultural preservation. By voicing their concerns, they will help the scholarly community be more responsive to the real world needs of migrants.

The speakers for the conference are:

Valentine Daniel, Professor, Anthropology, Columbia University

Arthur Spears, Professor, Linguistics and Anthropology, City University of New York

Jo Anne Kleifgen, Co-Director, Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies (Teacher’s College, Columbia University)

Scholars and students in departments such as African and African American Studies, Applied Linguistics, Comparative Literature, English, History, Sociology, and Labor Studies will attend and/or contribute. The event is co-sponsored with the Center for Language Acquisition.

Download Attachment

Lecture by Richard Kiely

Mar 18, 2009
MIGRATION STUDIES PROJECT AND CENTER FOR LANGUAGE ACQUISITION PRESENT: Academic Literacy and Communities of Practice: The Experience of International Postgraduate Students in a British University BY Richard Kiely Senior Lecturer Centre for Research on Language and Education University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

MARCH 18TH 2009 AT 7 SPARKS FROM 4.00 – 5.45PM

Richard Kiely is a senior lecturer in the Graduate School of Education University of Bristol, where he coordinates the Centre for Research on Language and Education (CREOLE), and teaches on a range of postgraduate courses. He has a PhD in Language Programme Evaluation and his current research interests include the development of academic literacies and teaching and teacher learning, both explored through socialization and communities of practice perspectives. He has published in Language Teaching Research, Modern Languages Journal, Studies in Educational Evaluation and Language Awareness, and with Pauline Rea-Dickins, has written a book: Programme Evaluation in Language Education (2005 Palgrave Macmillan).

Distinguished Lecture: “Facets of Transnational Life.”

Oct 27, 2008
Monday 27th October, 2008. Speaker: Luis Alberto Urrea, Mexican American novelist.

Lecture at 7 pm, at Foster Auditorium

Urrea’s prize winning novel The Devil’s Highway is a moving narration of 14 undocumented immigrants who tragically lost their way in the Arizona desert. His latest novel Hummingbird’s Daughter and his personal life resonate with issues of migration, multiculturalism, and transnational identities (see http://www.luisurrea.com/aboutluis.php). Latin@ Studies, English Department, the Center for Democratic Deliberation, and the Social Science Library of PSU co-sponsor this event.

Reading for students: Urrea will read from his fiction in a class from 11.15 am to 12.15 pm at 207 Henderson South for a class on Modern Latin America.

Lecture: Dilip Ratha, Senior Economist, World Bank

Sep 29, 2008
Dilip Ratha, Senior Economist, World Bank.

Lecture at Foster Auditorium.

Ratha is considered the leading expert on the implications of migrant labor for the economy and the role of remittances in development (www.worldbank.org/prospects/migrationandremittances). The Department of Labor Studies, the Asian Studies Program, and the Social Science Library of PSU co-sponsored this event.

Meetings with faculty: Ratha will meet with Paul Clark and members of the Department of Labor Studies for coffee at 3 pm to discuss research interests. He will meet with the advisory board and faculty participants of MSP at 4 pm to discuss funding sources and possible areas of collaboration.