Abstract
This presentation was given as part of the Diversity Matters Webinar "Race, Language, and Institutional Categories. A conversation with María Cioé-Peña, Kamran Khan, Verena Platzgummer, and Andrea Leone-Pizzighella" on 23 April 2024.
This webinar features María Cioé-Peña (NAED/Spencer Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania) and Kamran Khan (MOSAIC Centre, University of Birmingham) as well as Verena Platzgummer (University of Galway and Eurac Research) and Andrea Leone-Pizzighella (Marie Curie Fellow, Eurac Research) presenting research on the intersections of race, language, and other institutional categories in schools and society in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy.
Cioé-Peña will first discuss the erasure of Black Latines within and beyond bilingual education in the United States. Black erasure remains a large issue within bilingual education in light of the standard association of Blackness with African American identity and English monolingualism. Using autoethnography, Cioé-Peña underscores how Black Latine erasure in bilingual education upholds anti-Blackness and “model minority” narratives in education overall and how it results in tangible exclusion and oppression for all Black bi/multilinguals.
Turning to the United Kingdom, Khan will then discuss the intersections between citizenship, race, and language in examining how security—in and around real and imagined borders—has become increasingly embedded with notions of integration and citizenship. He describes how this shift results in particular forms of securitisation and surveillance which discursively construct ‘unintegrated’ citizens as a threat to the nation.
Platzgummer and Leone-Pizzighella will close the discussion by focusing on early childhood and lower secondary education contexts in the trilingual Italian province of South Tyrol. Cross-cutting the region’s German- and Italian-language educational institutions, they will address how teachers explicitly and implicitly orient to social, linguistic, ethnic, and educational groups and categories in their practice and in their reflections, as well as how these orientations relate to structural aspects of the educational institutions they work in.