Scholar of educational ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and migration co-edits seminal volume exploring the interface between language and political, economic, and cultural issues in global perspectives.
In her most recent book, “Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives,” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) UCLA Professor of Education Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez and her co-editors bring together a wealth of international voices to examine how language symbolizes, frames, and expresses political, economic, and psychic problems in society, thus contributing to visions for social justice.
García-Sánchez’s research interests, which have been supported by UCLA, Temple University, the National Academy of Education, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Spencer Foundation, center on the experiences of immigrant children and youth in and out of the classroom. Her international range of projects have included studies of peer relations and ethno-gendered bullying; mapping immigrant childhoods through storytelling; the everyday communication of immigrant children and its impact on cultural citizenship; and the experiences of Muslim children and youth in Spain around language and belonging.
A UCLA alumna, García-Sánchez (’09, Ph.D., Applied Linguistics) joined the faculty of the UCLA Department of Education in 2020, and currently serves as associate director of the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration. A native of southwestern Spain, she was previously an associate professor in the department of anthropology at Temple University. Her accolades include the Distinguished Faculty Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities at Temple University; a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship; and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education (American Anthropological Association).
García-Sánchez is the author of “Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging: Studies in Discourse and Culture” (2014, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell) and a co-editor of “Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and School: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups,” (2019, New York: Routledge) with UCLA Professor of Education Marjorie Elaine.
What is unique about this book and its international perspective?
Inmaculada García-Sánchez: We actually started thinking about this volume just before the pandemic hit. Right around late 2019, I envisioned the volume with two colleagues, Kate Riley and Bernard Perley. The three of us for many years have been very active in the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, [a] section of the American Anthropological Association which has had a very active group on language and social justice for many years.
A lot of what was being produced in the area of language and social justice was very centered [on] the United States [but] we also know that a lot of the injustices and inequalities we see in the world are global in nature.
When you talk about increasing economic disparities, that is true for so many places. The refugee crisis spans different continents and countries. We knew that a lot of systems of injustice are connected, and this was a central part of our theoretical orientation. We were inspired by post-colonial theory from the global South, which argues that globalization did not start in just the last 50 years. It started long before that, with links to colonialism. We thought it would be good to work on a project [focusing] on these issues of language and social justice, but that focuses globally. We look at what is happening in different parts of the world but with a sensitivity how these happenings may be connected.
One of the things that we talk a lot [about] in the introduction is what we mean by a global perspective. We mean it from a topical point of view, and we have case studies from South Africa to New Zealand, to China, to Spain and Chile, and from Indigenous nations [and] Canada. But we also mean “global” from an epistemological point of view: we were very intentional in inviting scholars who represented a range of diverse positionalities both in terms of seniority in the field and where they are located geographically.
We underscore that globalization is not just a phenomenon of the 20th century. We wanted to capture long global processes like colonialism and how they are related to neoliberal forms of globalization. We even encouraged some authors to find a collaborator who was working on common issues in a different place and write the chapter together. We have two scholars who work on deaf sociality and sign languages, one in Nepal and another one in Mexico, and they came together their chapter. A lot of the chapters ended up being multi-sided, collaborative, and comparative, including my own with Chantal Treteault on Islamophobia and education in Spain and France.
In general, we asked ourselves and everybody who contributed to the book to focus on how injustices are perceived from the point of view of those who suffer them. We were all very attentive to what social justice meant in specific local contexts [where] we were doing research, even if we were placing them in global perspective.
How do economics, race, and class tend to be guideposts of language?
García-Sánchez: When you think about it, language is a mediating tool for many kinds of sociopolitical and economic processes.
In the first section [of the book], we examine not only how language ideologies can lead to extreme forms of language, injustice, and economic and communicative deprivation, but we turn the analytical gaze on ourselves and begin thinking about our own institutional research. Research is also an institution, and we thought about what are important research stances for someone who [wants] to do work on language; what forms of research are collaborative and relationally accountable; and then, how might these forms of research also bring about transformative solidarity among different kinds of people, including researchers and communities.
In the second part, which we titled, “Confronting Hate and Violence,” we were examining the idea that symbolic and actual violence is often seen as dichotomous, which we do not agree with. We were thinking about the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who talked about the symbolic murder of the other and how these kinds of discourses – [which are] forms of hate and violence – very often are the precursor to actual violence and forms of genocide and ethnic cleansing [and] how sometimes … the precursor also involves the complete eradication of the languages of the other. We see this throughout colonial history, particularly in the Americas with Indigenous languages.
[We were] also thinking about how, not just language but the lack of language – in a sense, silence – mediates certain forms of justice, especially in the aftermath of mass violence.
One of the contributors, Keziah Conrad, did her work in Sarajevo a couple of decades after the Bosnian war. Whenever you are looking at forms of mass violence, you will find those who will want to deny or minimize the harm or violence done to people, to either avoid responsibility and accountability or to avoid more conflict and promote “peace.”
So in a sense, we are also examining the limits of truth and truth telling, and how that is related to a sense of justice… and [asking], “Justice for whom?” In many Western settings in particular there is a strong sense that justice equals telling your story or your perspective, those are what tribunals of truth and reconciliation are based on. But for some people living in Sarajevo, they [say], “Well, there are limits to that. If I want to have … social peace as part of this transition, I have to keep [silent].”
The third part [focuses] on working conditions, precarity, privatization, and any form of injustice at the intersection of language and labor.
We are also examining issues of [the] concept [of] de-translation. Sometimes, when you translate something, you must accommodate how hegemonic languages carve [out] the world. When you are translating – and this is an actual example in the book – from Chinese to English, it’s like, “Well, the word ‘culture’ in Chinese doesn’t mean exactly the same [thing] as it does in English, but to accommodate the West, we have to translate it in this way.” There’s this movement of de-translation, [using] a word that doesn’t really fit, to try to explain what you mean.
This third part is related to geopolitical struggles over knowledge, protection, political recognition, cultural and linguistic commensurability. And to the nature of injustice in the contemporary global political economy of capitalism and neoliberalism.
How does the book address on-the-ground efforts toward social justice?
García-Sánchez: The last part we titled, “Negotiating Resources in the Anthropocene.” In this part, the contributors talk about tensions and the need to balance things like access and learning, colonial and hegemonic language, [and] language varieties, but also the need for reclamation and revitalization and re-inscription of Indigenous languages, which we see all the time in the field of education. We want children to keep their vernacular English, but here in the U.S.A., they also need to learn [formal] English, and the kinds of tensions this brings about is a constant throughout the book.
We explore these tensions and the limits of social justice when understood as access alone, throughout the book. Many forms of social justice based on ideas of redistribution, or access to and redistribution of goods and services—for example, mere access to linguistic resources, education, medical services, or food may not actually bring about meaningful social justice and transformation.
We have a number of chapters [from] people working with activists on the ground, and one of them does work with food activists in Cuba. Grassroots activists may have very different ideas of what social justice means than those found in the Western academic traditions.
We also wanted to discuss in Part IV how the Anthropocene makes reference to climate change and climate crisis and to our losses of both bio- and linguistic diversity. It turns out that the places in the world where the [most] languages are in danger of disappearing are also the parts of the world where we’re seeing the greatest loss of biodiversity, which is very interesting. We also have a chapter in Part IV about caring and our responsibility to our non-human relations as part of research on language and social justice, which traditionally people don’t think about as part of the scope of this kind of research.
And then, because we want to be future-forward in this part of the book, Bernard Perley uses the idea of transformative justice to think not only about how to repair past harm in a way that feels okay and appropriate to the people to whom the harm was done… but also about how we can avoid causing repeat the harm in the future. This is especially important when you’re working with populations that have been victims of genocide, like Indigenous people on this continent or people who have experienced severe situations of exclusion and marginalization.
A big takeaway from the volume is the idea that “social justice” what it may mean to you or what it may mean to me as a researcher may not be the same thing that it means to people on the ground or to the people you’re working with and documenting and supporting.