Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School

Talk Summary

Revealing the complex ways young people understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives, Ariana Mangual Figueroa observes when and how six Latina students from mixed-immigration-status families choose to talk about citizenship. She models new ways to collaborate with educators, children, and families, ultimately offering a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom. Click here to register!

Speaker Bio

Ariana Mangual Figueroa draws from language socialization and linguistic anthropology to examine language use and learning in Latinx communities in the United States. Her ethnographic research seeks to understand how the lives of children and adults in mixed-status families are shaped by citizenship status and schooling practices during everyday, routine interactions. Her work has appeared in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Language Policy, and the American Educational Research Journal. She is currently a co-principal Investigator of two longitudinal research projects: the first is called the "Putting Immigration and Education into Conversation Everyday" (PIECE) Research Project funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation, and the second is the City University of New York-Initiative on Immigration and Education (CUNY-IIE, see http://www.cuny-iie.org). Before obtaining her Ph.D., she taught English as a Second Language and Spanish in the Bronx and Brooklyn public schools.