The Latin American and Latino/a Studies program, the Bilingual Education program, and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures welcome Dr. Jonathan Rosa to campus for Bilingual Advocacy. Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Center for Comparative studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. An interdisciplinary scholar and educator, he holds courtesy appoints in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature. He also serves as director of Stanford’s program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and as co-director of the Center for Global Ethnography. Educated at the University of Chicago (M.A. 2006, Ph.D. 2010) and Swarthmore College (B.A. 2003), he has held fellowships or appointments at Northwestern, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and New York University. His scholarship on language and race analyzes the interrelations—structured by colonialism—among racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and institutional inequity. His community-based approach to research, teaching, and service reflects his commitment to working toward a more just world in and through each of these professional areas.
His keynote lecture is titled “Latinx Languages and Identities Beyond Borders: Redefining Communicative ‘Problems’ and Reimagining Decolonial Possibilities” and will be held Thursday, April 4, 2024, 7-8:30 p.m. in the Old Main Room inside the Bone Student Center. Latinx communities’ multilingual practices are often framed as learning impediments, thereby scapegoating them as primary causes of educational and broader societal problems. This presentation draws on critical decolonial perspectives to reconsider the historical and contemporary consolidation of borders delimiting languages, identities, and geographies. Such a reconceptualization points to opportunities for reckoning, redress, and reimagination that emerge when we approach marginalized communities not as communicatively deficient, but rather, as dynamic linguistic contexts that unsettle conventional assumptions about knowledge, skills, and schooling.
Rosa is the author of Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press), which won the First Book Award from the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2021 and the Prose Award for Excellence in Language & Linguistics in 2020. Rosa is also the recipient of the Charles A. Ferguson Award for Outstanding Scholarship, from the Center for Applied Linguistics (2018). He is co-editor of the volume Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge), and his work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision.
While at ISU, Rosa will also meet with students in the School of Teaching Learning and the Student Association for Bilingual Education (SABE). He will also join a group of faculty, staff, students, and teachers and administrators from local school districts to discuss his book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race.
These events are sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund; Student Association for Bilingual Education (SABE); Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Latin American and Latina/o Studies program; School of Teaching and Learning; College of Arts and Sciences; College of Education; College of Education Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity, and Accessibility Seed Grant.
