Neriko Musha Doerr Livres

The book explores the impact of categorizing students by ethnicity, age, gender, and language within the context of a secondary school in Aotearoa/New Zealand, particularly focusing on its bilingual program. It examines how neoliberal reforms and the shift toward biculturalism influence educational access and academic achievement. By analyzing the everyday implications of these categorizations, the work sheds light on the broader themes of subjectivity, ethnic relations, and nationhood, making it a vital resource for those interested in bilingual education.

Focusing on the politics of perception, the book introduces innovative concepts such as "tinted glasses," "unit-thinking," and "coherants" to explore how we interpret the world. By analyzing experiences in a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, and college classrooms, it uncovers the influence of unit-thinking and fetishism across various settings. The work ultimately seeks to understand these dynamics and their potential to foster social change.

This volume explores „performative linguistic space“, namely a space which ushers or hinders linguistic practices. Space is made productive as a result of individuals who bring linguistic politics from diverse spaces into new ones. By moving away from the notions of discrete units of language and linguistic communities associated with a specific space, this volume suggests a fluid productive aspect of space. It goes beyond the assumed space-linguistic community association through ethnographic accounts that mediate linguistic anthropology, cultural geography, sociolinguistics, and deaf studies.

The concept of the "native speaker" is often seen as an ideal language user with complete and possibly innate competence, tied to a fixed speech community and nation-state. Despite challenges to its accuracy and utility, this notion remains prevalent. The focus shifts from second language acquisition and teaching practices to daily interactions within broader sociocultural and political contexts marked by global movements and multilingualism. Using an ethnographic approach, the volume critically examines the political implications of claiming or not claiming "native speaker" status in everyday life, exploring how this ideology intersects with various relations of dominance and standardization regimes. It presents case studies from diverse settings, including classrooms in Japan, a coffee shop in Barcelona, secondary schools in South Africa, and more, illustrating the complexity of language use. Additionally, it traces the genealogy of the "native speaker" concept from the Roman Empire. By integrating linguistic, anthropological, and educational theories, the volume contributes to the analysis of language use, policy, and teaching, while also investigating the broader effects of language ideology on power dynamics and institutional practices.