Nelson Flores – författare

This Oxford Handbook challenges basic concepts that have informed the study of sociolinguistics since its inception in the 1960s. In 27 chapters, the book challenges the modernist positivist perspective of the field that has treated languages and speech communities as bounded and the idealized native speaker as the ultimate authority. Instead, it offers a critical poststructuralist perspective that examines the socio-historical context that led to the emergence of dominant sociolinguistic concepts and develops new theoretical and methodological tools that challenge these dominant concepts. The contributors to this volume take this critical poststructuralist perspective as a starting point for engaging in explorations of a range of sociolinguistic topics including language variation, language ideologies, bi/multilingualism, language policy, linguistic landscapes and multimodality. Each of the contributors provides a critical overview of the limits of modernist positivist perspectives on their topic and offer ways of theorizing and researching their topic in ways that are aligned with a critical poststructuralist perspective. The book also provides a global perspective on these issues with contributors focused on North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Africa. Together, the interdisciplinary and global contributions reveal the limits of conventional approaches to sociolinguistics and offer a glimpse into directions for the future of the field.

Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. In Becoming the System, author Nelson Flores challenges that framework by examining the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies. He adopts a methodology that he terms raciolinguistic genealogy as a point of entry for arguing that the institutionalization of bilingual education was part of a broader reconfiguration of race in the postcolonial era. This reconfiguration located the root of racial inequities within a psychologically damaged racialized subject who, after having experienced multiple generations of racial oppression, had either from a liberal perspective developed a culture of poverty or a radical perspective developed colonized mindset that prevented racial progress. After examining the ways that this psychologically damaged racialized subject provided the ideological foundation for the Bilingual Education Act (BEA), Flores then examines how institutionalizing the BEA produced a cadre of Latinx professionals who were afforded contingent proximity to whiteness in exchange for their acceptance of deficit framings of Latinx communities. He goes on to examine the ways that this institutionalization helped pave the way for neoliberal educational reforms that serve to maintain the racial status quo. This has culminated in the exponential growth of dual language education as a commodity for affluent monolingual white families even as the bilingualism of Latinx communities continue to be pathologized and policed. Flores concludes by implicating himself as a Latinx professional working in bilingual education in this political incorporation and posits the present volume as resistance to the commodification and weaponization of Latinx bilingualism.

Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. In Becoming the System, author Nelson Flores challenges that framework by examining the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies. He adopts a methodology that he terms raciolinguistic genealogy as a point of entry for arguing that the institutionalization of bilingual education was part of a broader reconfiguration of race in the postcolonial era. This reconfiguration located the root of racial inequities within a psychologically damaged racialized subject who, after having experienced multiple generations of racial oppression, had either from a liberal perspective developed a culture of poverty or a radical perspective developed colonized mindset that prevented racial progress. After examining the ways that this psychologically damaged racialized subject provided the ideological foundation for the Bilingual Education Act (BEA), Flores then examines how institutionalizing the BEA produced a cadre of Latinx professionals who were afforded contingent proximity to whiteness in exchange for their acceptance of deficit framings of Latinx communities. He goes on to examine the ways that this institutionalization helped pave the way for neoliberal educational reforms that serve to maintain the racial status quo. This has culminated in the exponential growth of dual language education as a commodity for affluent monolingual white families even as the bilingualism of Latinx communities continue to be pathologized and policed. Flores concludes by implicating himself as a Latinx professional working in bilingual education in this political incorporation and posits the present volume as resistance to the commodification and weaponization of Latinx bilingualism.

This Oxford Handbook challenges basic concepts that have informed the study of sociolinguistics since its inception in the 1960s. In 27 chapters, the book challenges the modernist positivist perspective of the field that has treated languages and speech communities as bounded and the idealized native speaker as the ultimate authority. Instead, it offers a critical poststructuralist perspective that examines the socio-historical context that led to the emergence of dominant sociolinguistic concepts and develops new theoretical and methodological tools that challenge these dominant concepts. The contributors to this volume take this critical poststructuralist perspective as a starting point for engaging in explorations of a range of sociolinguistic topics including language variation, language ideologies, bi/multilingualism, language policy, linguistic landscapes and multimodality. Each of the contributors provides a critical overview of the limits of modernist positivist perspectives on their topic and offer ways of theorizing and researching their topic in ways that are aligned with a critical poststructuralist perspective. The book also provides a global perspective on these issues with contributors focused on North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Africa. Together, the interdisciplinary and global contributions reveal the limits of conventional approaches to sociolinguistics and offer a glimpse into directions for the future of the field.

It is common for scholarly and mainstream discourses on dual language education in the US to frame these programs as inherently socially transformative and to see their proliferation in recent years as a natural means of developing more anti-racist spaces in public schools. In contrast, this book adopts a raciolinguistic perspective that points to the contradictory role that these programs play in both reproducing and challenging racial hierarchies. The book includes 11 chapters that adopt a range of methodological techniques (qualitative, quantitative and textual), disciplinary perspectives (linguistics, sociology and anthropology) and language foci (Spanish, Hebrew and Korean) to examine the ways that dual language education programs in the US often reinforce the racial inequities that they purport to challenge.

It is common for scholarly and mainstream discourses on dual language education in the US to frame these programs as inherently socially transformative and to see their proliferation in recent years as a natural means of developing more anti-racist spaces in public schools. In contrast, this book adopts a raciolinguistic perspective that points to the contradictory role that these programs play in both reproducing and challenging racial hierarchies. The book includes 11 chapters that adopt a range of methodological techniques (qualitative, quantitative and textual), disciplinary perspectives (linguistics, sociology and anthropology) and language foci (Spanish, Hebrew and Korean) to examine the ways that dual language education programs in the US often reinforce the racial inequities that they purport to challenge.