Filtering by
- All Subjects: Language
- All Subjects: Immigrants
- Creators: Warriner, Doris
Conversations between immigrant parents and their Americanized children are often difficult conversations to approach. Children are expected to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives from a young age. Sometimes, what the child wants to do does not align with what their parents want them to do. It is hard to approach those conversations about pursuing higher education, especially when the response is an unknown variable. This research study aims to determine how those conversations about higher education were viewed from the standpoint of the young adult child. It investigates young adults whose ages span from 18 to 24 and how those conversations they had when they were younger impacted who they became. Using data collected from twelve interviewees whose gender, age, and ethnicity varied, this study examines specific instances in those conversations about higher education between the young adult and their immigrant parents and the main factors behind some shared experiences. I discuss those factors, as well as limitations within the study, and provide future direction recommendations.
Drawing on ethnographic research methods and critical-incident methodologies that involved the CHNs in the inquiry process, this study provides a nuanced analysis of the different kinds of work they do, the constraints they encounter, and how they creatively respond to such constraints in real time. The findings demonstrate that a collaborative engagement with critical incidents as a method of intercultural inquiry facilitates a more robust and dynamic understanding of the distributed nature of decision-making practices and ways of knowing. Embodying sensitivity to situated ways of knowing and dynamic practices in institutional settings, this study demonstrates the value of combining social science methodologies with rhetorical inquiry methods to conduct interdisciplinary and cross-institutional research to address pressing social problems in ways that benefit historically marginalized groups.
The study investigates how youth understand and navigate the school language policy, practices and discourses that position them, and specifically seeks to learn how being identified as an “English Language Learner” interacts with youth’s construction of academic and social identities. Adopting a critical sociocultural theory of language policy (following McCarty, 2011), employing ethnographically-informed research methods, and using social-positioning as an analytic lens, I aim to learn from an emic youth perspective and to amplify their voices. Eight Somali and two Iraqi students took part in two individual in-depth interviews; five students participated in a focus group; and all engaged in numerous informal conversations during 22 researcher site visits to an ethnic community-based organization (ECBO) and a family apartment.
Narratives recounting the participants’ lived experiences in the socio-cultural context of high school provide powerful examples of youth asserting personal agency and engaging in small acts of resistance to contest disagreeable positioning. The findings thus support the conceptualization of youth as creative producers of hybridity in response to their environments. This work also confirms the perennial significance of social categories and “othering” in high school. Though the institutional structure of separate classrooms and concomitant limited access to required courses hinder the study participants’ academic progress, the youth speak positively about the comfort of comradery and friendship in the shared safe space of the separate SEI classroom. The dissertation concludes with participants’ recommendations for educators, and the people refugee youth interact with in the context of high school, to improve refugee youth’s experience.
My grandfather, Al Foon Lai, was a paper son. As an adult, I learned that paper sons were members of paper families that may or may not actually exist except on paper; furthermore paper immigration was the way many Chinese entered the United States to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Grandfather held legal status, but grandfather's name was fictitious and thus his entry to the United States in 1920 was illegal. Today by some authorities he would be classified as an illegal immigrant. As Grandfather's status as a paper son suggest, Grandfather's credibility as someone with the legal prerogative to reside in the U.S. was a dynamic construct that was negotiated in light of the changing cultural norms encoded in shifting immigration policies. Grandfather constructed his ethos "to do persuasion" in administrative hearings mandated under the Chinese Exclusion Act that produced asymmetrical power relations. By asymmetrical power relations I mean the unequal status between the administrator overseeing the hearing and Lai the immigrant. The unequal status was manifest in the techniques and procedures employed by the administrative body empowered to implement the Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent laws that affected Chinese immigrants. Combining tools from narrative analysis and feminists rhetorical methods I analyze excerpts from Al Foon Lai's transcripts from three administrative hearings between 1926 and 1965. It finds that Grandfather employed narrative strategies that show the nature of negotiating ethos in asymmetrical power situations and the link between the performance of ethos and the political and social context.