This ethnography examines the links between race and language at a private French-English school in Dakar, Senegal. Drawing on theories of de/coloniality, anthropology of white supremacy, and raciolinguistics, this article examines the ways in which racial and linguistic ideologies circulated within the school, in particular around discussions of…

The Iranian howzevi (seminarian) have been key to the Islamic regime's development. This paper takes as its critical focus the branding of the howzevi as the unenlightened for their support of the regime. I take de Certeau's reading as poaching to look at how life scripts or ideologies failed to work through women's bodies. Drawing on fifteen…

Declining support for US higher education and the corporatization of this institution shape students' experiences. This ethnography describes a campus culture stratified by an ideology called "majorism." Majorism, a term particular to this study's site, is the preferential treatment of science and technology over the Liberal Arts. By…

Focusing on low-cost English-medium schools, this article investigates whether the ideology of the transformative potential of English-medium education squares with most people's experiences of this education in urban India. It shows how such schools enable socioeconomic mobility among the middle classes while also creating new forms of…

This paper investigates the relationship between meso university language policies in Puerto Rico and their micro instantiations in an undergraduate psychology classroom. We describe a typology of language policies used by 38 universities and campuses in Puerto Rico where their openness allows for flexible implementation of everyday micro policy.…

This study examines the schooling of black male students in a U.S. high school. Drawing upon positioning theory and student resistance literature, I describe how the students make meaning of the pathologizing positioning practices of the school, including how they resist and internalize dominant discourses about black masculinity and how their…

Through an ethnographic study of dance teachers in Israel, this article calls attention to the teaching body as an active social agent and introduces the concept of body signature. It examines the bodily comportment of three dance teachers, arguing for embodied education ideologies, and the ability of teachers to maneuver within these concepts and…

This article explores how Confucius Institute teachers and U.S. students use language to index qualities of Chinese people and culture. The study draws on the model of "linguistic fact" to argue that students' and teachers' contextualized use of language occurs in relation to their different yet naturalized assumptions about a commonly…

Drawing on key incident analysis of classroom transcripts from Bashkortostan, France, North Korea, and Suriname, this article discusses the relationship between an increasingly canonical content of education and the discursive organization of teaching processes at the expense of both teachers' and students' voice. It argues that canonical…

This article presents a holistic view of ideological barriers to bilingual policy implementation in Sri Lanka, a conflict-ridden postcolonial nation-state. I examine Sinhalese youth and adults' Tamil as a second language (TSL) learning and speaking practices across three contexts: a multilingual school, a program for government servants, and an…

This article investigates how Moroccan public high-school students experience religious pedagogy. Probing the linguistic ideology that underpins their religious training, the article exposes the ambiguities inherent in educational Arabization, a project set on safeguarding the state's sacredness while mediating an agenda of indigenous…

In moments of "dispersion, diaspora, and reterritorialization" (Amy Shuman 2006), the personal, the interactional, and the improvised (the "micro") cannot be separated analytically from circulating ideologies, institutional norms, or cultural flows (the "macro"). With a focus on the emergence of identities within social interaction, specifically…

Drawing on fieldwork in a primary school in rural Gambia, West Africa, this article foregrounds the notion of voice as analytical heuristics for understanding language in education. Arguing for more attention to voices from the field and for critical reflection on the researcher's voice in research, the article addresses the ways in which school…

This article is concerned with the relationship between education, aspiration, and social mobility in Chhattisgarh, central India. I am interested in how the ideology of education as an intrinsic "social good" squares with the everyday experiences of marginalized "adivasi" (tribal) girls. My aim is to understand why education…

This article explores how we can better understand the language ideologies of teachers working with second language learners through narrative analysis. This analysis draws on ethnographic data collected in an urban high school with a predominant Latina/o population and nearly a quarter designated as English learners. This analysis illustrates how…