Despite an increased interest in academic language in recent years, critical and sociopolitical perspectives in this area of scholarship remain scarce. This paper presents brings such perspectives to the study of academic language by proposing a framework that highlights its situated social meanings through a focus on social identities and…

With the pervasiveness of racism, some scholars have interrogated the role of discourse in perpetuating the racial status quo. While research has denoted how prominent leaders and policies advance deficit-laden characterizations of minoritized groups that reify racial hierarchies, how racial discourse is mobilized in day-to-day politics remains…

This study presents a critical policy analysis of California's Assembly Bill 329 (AB 329) regarding inclusive sex education, coupled with a series of coding phases of relevant data. AB 329, enacted in 2015, mandates comprehensive sexual health education in California schools, aiming to address the needs of diverse student populations, including…

This study explores the discourse, and identifies the predominance of the language of commercial capital now dominating the two State University Systems in California, the State University of California and the University of California. Data for analysis were from the webpages of the thirty-three campuses of these systems. Lexical analysis was…

Symbolic competence, "the ability to actively manipulate and shape one's environment on multiple scales of time and space" (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 667), offers researchers and educators the ability to understand how learners position themselves. This positioning involves a vying for semiotic resources as a means to question…

This article brings to light discourses that constituted the education of Asian-American children in California in the second half of the nineteenth century. Guided by Foucaultian ideas and critical race theory, I analyze California public school laws, speeches of a governor-elect and a superintendent, and a report of the board of supervisors,…

The increasing use of zero tolerance discipline policies in the USA has led to a "discipline gap," in which minoritized students receive harsher and more frequent suspensions and expulsions than their peers from dominant cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Though disciplinary decisions are made by educators at the school level,…

This paper examines 12 states' statutes that extend in-state resident tuition for undocumented students, illustrating their ambiguities and contradictions as they produce the "subject" in these on-going policy debates. This study asks and answers the question: "How are students' identities produced in ISRT policy?" At stake in…

Mathematics classrooms are conceptualized as heterogeneous spaces in which multiple figured worlds come into contact. The study explores how a group of high school students drew upon several figured worlds as they navigated mathematical discussions. (Contains 5 excerpts and 2 footnotes.)

A qualitative study, presented in the form of an analytical narrative, examined children's symbolic and social use of superhero stories--popular media stories that vividly reveal societal beliefs about power and gender, which are themselves interwoven in complex ways with race, class, and physical demeanor. A second-grade classroom in an East San…

Challenging the Cartesian dualisms that essentialize difference, this essay offers strategies for building transracial, feminist alliances through pedagogy. The authors argue that resistive classroom spaces should be created in which students and teachers challenge the discourses of domination that structure our understandings of identity and…