This article focuses on teachers' identity construction in the context of a "failing" inner-city high school. Framing teachers' student stories as narrative resources for solving both the practical and identity problems that confront them in an underresourced, inner-city school, the article argues that these stories can serve…

Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one…

Based on my fieldwork with Burmese teachers in Thailand, I describe the drawbacks of using IRB-mandated written consent procedures in my cross-cultural collaborative ethnographic research on education. Drawing on theories of intersubjectivity (Mikhail Bakhtin), ethics (Emmanuel Levinas), and translation (Naoki Sakai), I describe face-to-face…

This article explores the possibility of anthropology as Bildung, or self-cultivation. As an educational mode, Bildung is focused on the moral education of students, encouraging them to broaden themselves in their encounters with others. I will discuss this process in terms of a lesson I learned from the highland Maya about being a good neighbor…

This article examines the symbolic boundary work that is carried out at a school whose student population is heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and class. Based on ethnography, the article demonstrates how the school's staff seeks to neutralize ethnic boundaries and their accompanying discourse, while the pupils try to bring ethnic…

This article ethnographically analyzes the practices of deaf young adults in Bangalore, India. As sign language is not used by families, schools, or other institutions, the church is a crucial educational space. Churchgoing provides deaf young adults with opportunities to orient themselves toward other deaf young adults, to develop new ideas of…

This article examines the significance of the "struggling reader" identity on students' classroom experiences. Drawing upon sociocultural theories of literacy, performance theories of education, and psychosocial qualities of identity, I argue that such an identity is felt, lived, and embodied throughout students' daily…

In this address, I ask: What do we bring as anthropologists and educators to our work? Two projects frame my arguments: my work with teachers in Aceh, Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and my term on a school board in an impoverished U.S. city. I conclude that at a time when challenges are simultaneously local and global, immediate and long term,…

When anthropologists of education, who embrace an activist or action-focused orientation, locate their work within community-based settings, they bear a responsibility to act in ways that not only produce new knowledge but that are also responsive to the immediate circumstances. Katherine Schultz's Presidential Address evokes two related…

This article explores young people's home literacy practices drawing on an ethnographic study of writing in the home of a British Asian family living in northern England. The theoretical framework comes from the New Literacy Studies, and aesthetic and literary theory. It applies an ethnographic methodology together with an engaged approach to…

Brazil has recently enacted sweeping policies against racial inequality, including a mandate to teach African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in schools across the country. This article analyzes Afro-Brazilian activists' heteroglossic engagement with recent legal and social changes while leading teacher-training courses. I demonstrate…

This article explores the role of profanity and graphic humor in the bilingual wordplay of Latin@ middle school students. We highlight the creativity, skill, and communicative competence embedded in this transgressive wordplay, revealing how these youth employed profanity and graphic humor to index ethnic solidarity and construct bilingual…

Restorative justice has gained ascendancy within both judicial systems and educational settings through which court-involved youth are resocialized as part of reintegration intervention. This article explores the conflict over collective representation at the intersections among public education, criminal justice, and restorative intervention. The…

This article presents a critical race theory analysis of teachers' and students' language policy negotiation. It draws on an ethnographic study in a high-school English as a Second Language (ESL) program. Results demonstrate how race-language processes create conditions that traumatize immigrant and bilingual youth of color through…

There is an ample scholarly and popular literature describing the rise in "anxiety" among middle-class parents. This paper draws from a study of urban middle-class parents who were considering sending their children to public school. Focusing on one neighborhood and its school, it describes the impact of anxiety on the choice process. It further…