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It's no secret that fun is important to American college students, but it is unusual for scholars to pay attention to how undergraduates represent and reflect on their partying. Linguist and anthropologist Chaise LaDousa explores the visual manifestations of collegiate fun in a Midwestern college town where house signs on off-campus student residences are a focal point of college culture. With names like Boot 'N Rally, The Plantation, and Crib of the Rib, house signs reproduce consequential categories of gender, sexuality, race, and faith in a medium students say is benign. Through his analysis of house signs and what students say about them, LaDousa introduces the reader to key concepts and approaches in cultural analysis.
As scholars and administrators have sharpened their focus on higher education beyond trends in access and graduation rates for underrepresented college students, there are growing calls for understanding the experiential dimensions of college life. This contributed book explores what actually happens on campus as students from an increasingly wide range of backgrounds enroll and share space. Chapter authors investigate how students of differing socioeconomic backgrounds, genders, and racial/ethnic groups navigate academic institutions alongside each other. Rather than treat diversity as mere difference, this volume provides dynamic analyses of how students come to experience both power and marginality in their campus lives. Each chapter comprises an empirical qualitative study from scholars engaged in cutting-edge research about campus life. This exciting book provides administrators and faculty new ways to think about students’ vulnerabilities and strengths.
This book examines medium of instruction in education and studies its social, economic, and political significance in the lives of people living in South Asia. It provides insight into the meaning of medium and what makes it so important to identity, aspiration, and inequality. It questions the ideologized associations between education and social and spatial mobility and discusses the gender- and class-based marginalization that comes with vernacular-medium education. The volume also considers how policy measures, such as the Right to Education (RTE) Act in India, have failed to address the inequalities brought by medium in schools, and investigates questions on language access, inclusion, and rights. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the book will be indispensable for students and scholars of anthropology, education studies, sociolinguistics, sociology, and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to those interested in language and education in South Asia, especially the role of language in the reproduction of inequality.
A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities. The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India. Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.
The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package. Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.
A discussion of the implications of the emergence of love-letter correspondences for social relations in Nepal
In The Struggle for a Multilingual Future, Christina Davis examines the tension between ethnic conflict and multilingual education policy in the linguistic and social practices of Sri Lankan minority youth. Facing a legacy of post-independence language and education policies that were among the complex causes of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983 - 2009), the government has recently sought to promote interethnic integration through trilingual language policies in Sinhala, Tamil, and English in state schools. Integrating ethnographic and linguistic research in and around two schools during the last phase of the war, Davis's research shows how, despite the intention of the reforms, practices on the ground reinforce language-based models of ethnicity and sustain ethnic divisions and power inequalities. By engaging with the actual experiences of Tamil and Muslim youth, Davis demonstrates the difficulties of using language policy to ameliorate ethnic conflict if it does not also address how that conflict is produced and reproduced in everyday talk.
An ethnography of urban women television viewers in India, and their reception of particular shows, especially in relation to issues of gender and nation.
Explores 'simultaneity' to show 'unresolved co-presences' of contradictory ways through which people maintain multi-layered identities.
Jenny Huberman provides an ethnographic study of encounters between western tourists and the children who work as unlicensed peddlers and guides along the riverfront city of Banaras, India. She examines how and why these children elicit such powerful reactions from western tourists and locals in their community as well as how the children themselves experience their work and render it meaningful. Ambivalent Encounters brings together scholarship on the anthropology of childhood, tourism, consumption, and exchange to ask why children emerge as objects of the international tourist gaze; what role they play in representing socio-economic change; how children are valued and devalued; why they el...