Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez

Professor

Drawing on a multi-method ethnographic approach to learning and schooling, García’s research agenda offers a critical dialogue between educational ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and migration studies. Her work explores the relation between language practices, the schooling of immigrant children and youth, and larger sociopolitical processes, with a particular emphasis on how educational justice intersects with the cultural politics of recognition and belonging that immigrant children and youth must negotiate on a daily basis. She places language and other semiotic processes at the center of her analysis, combining ethnographic, historical, and discursive analytic approaches to offer a multi-layered and empirically-grounded view of central issues of concern in educational scholarship: 1) the tensions between educational ideologies and actual classroom practice, 2) the linguistic and social stratification of non-dominant students in educational spaces, and 3) making learning processes visible, including how immigrant children themselves actively make sense of learning contexts.

Departments

Department of Education

Programs

Social Research Methodology

Academic Advising Specializations

Expertise

Research Centers

Titles and Positions

Associate Director, Center for the Study of International Migration

Awards, Honors and Fellowships

2017-2018, Distinguished Faculty Fellowship. Center for the Humanities at Temple. Temple University
2012-2013, National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
2009, Outstanding Dissertation Award. Council on Anthropology and Education (American Anthropological Association)

Education

Ph.D., Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009.

Select Publications

de León, L. and García-Sánchez, I. M. (2021) “Language Socialization at the Intersection of the Local and the Global: The Contested Trajectories of Input and Communicative Competence”. Annual Review of Linguistics, vol. 7.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2018) “Children as Interactional Brokers of Care.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 47, pp. 167-184.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2013) “The Everyday Politics of ‘Cultural Citizenship’ among North African Immigrant School Children in Spain.” Language and Communication 33:481-499.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2010) “Serious Games: Code-switching and Identity in Moroccan Immigrant Girls’ Pretend Play.” Pragmatics 20(4):523-555.

García-Sánchez, I. M. and Orellana, M. F. (2006) “The Construction of Moral and Social Identity in Immigrant Children’s Narratives-in-Translation.” Linguistics and Education 17(3):209-239.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2020). “Interactional Contingencies and Contradictions in the Socialization of Tolerance in a Spanish Multicultural School.” In Howard, K. M. and Burdelski M. (Eds.) Language socialization in classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2019) “Centering Shared Linguistic Heritage to Build Language and Literacy Resilience Among Immigrant Students”. In García-Sánchez, I. M. and Orellana Faulstich, M. (Eds.) Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and School: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups. New York: Routledge.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2016) “Multiculturalism and Its Discontents: Essentializing Ethnic Moroccan and Roma Identities in Classroom Discourse in Spain.” In Alim H. S., J. Rickford, and A. Ball (Eds.) Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2012) “Language Socialization and Exclusion.” In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, and B. Schieffelin (Eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.