Wednesday, April 28, 2021
2:00-4:00 pm EDT
Jonathan Rosa
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education
Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Stanford University
This presentation reconceptualizes racial and linguistic profiling by drawing on semiotic insights to explore the institutional co-naturalization of language and race. Whereas US-based racial and linguistic profiling is often understood as a problem reflected by discriminatory behavior at the individual level, Rosa focuses on the institutionalized processes that shape and often overdetermine individual construals of profiled entities. Examining various incidents that have come to be associated with racial and linguistic profiling, he shows how bodies, practices, and materialities are racialized in multiple, often contradictory ways depending on the spatiotemporal contexts and institutionalized modes of perception through which they are apprehended. Rosa examines apprehension both at the level of individual perception and institutional consequentiality. He also considers how members of broader publics come to discover institutional processes such as racial and linguistic profiling as systematic rather than accidental, and how they respond to problems that are (re)produced by institutions and not simply human actors–or how institutions come to be recognized as actors. The broader goal is to contribute to efforts toward understanding and dismantling endemic societal hierarchies that racial and linguistic profiling serve to (re)produce.
Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics, at Stanford University. He also currently serves as Director of Stanford’s Program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and President of the Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association. Jonathan’s research centers on joint analyses of racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and educational inequity, as well as collaborations with schools and communities to track these phenomena and develop tools for understanding and eradicating the forms of disparity to which they correspond. He is author of the book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of the volume, Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and Univision.
Co-Sponsors: The Center for the Humanities at Tufts; Department of Anthropology; the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora; and the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.