Papers by Bonnie Urciuoli
In the United States, racializing, ethnicizing, and neoliberal diversity discourses con struct th... more In the United States, racializing, ethnicizing, and neoliberal diversity discourses con struct the terms of belonging to a larger social order. All hierarchize markedness (the terms of inclusion or exclusion) but in ideologically distinct ways. Racializing discourses emphasize traits (social, psychological, linguistic) assumed to be natural and marked as a danger to the nation. Ethnicizing discourses emphasize traits marked by association with nationality or culture outside the United States but that are interpreted as contributions to the nation. Neoliberal diversity discourses emphasize traits marked by association with nationality or culture outside or marked social groups within the United States but that are also seen as contributions to a corporate order of productivity. The same people might be viewed through any of these three lenses, depending on what motivates the viewers and how that is realized through discursive elements and their linked social processes.
a remarkably interesting, well-argued, ethnographically rich book o real weight and consequence .... more a remarkably interesting, well-argued, ethnographically rich book o real weight and consequence . . . A highlight is the combination o more ethnographic, analytical chapters by aculty scholars and quite telling and a ecting re lections by undergraduates (or recent graduates). Don Brenneis, University o Cali ornia, Santa Cruz
Once upon a time, the U.S. college experience was simply what a student experienced when attendin... more Once upon a time, the U.S. college experience was simply what a student experienced when attending college, and was heavily associated with elite institutions and liberal arts education. That notion certainly lingers. But in contemporary higher education, the idea of experience has also become a property of specifi cally defi ned and administratively structured activities that students do: fi rst-year experience, study abroad, internship, and service-learning, much of it under the rubric of experiential learning. All these experiences are assigned value comparable and complementary to academics, and are treated as assess-able in parallel ways, perhaps even on extracurricular " transcripts. " Administrative structures and even ancillary industries have arisen to manage them, and they have become an important element of college marketing. The idea that education could be grounded in an organic, subjectively distinct experience and at the same time reifi ed and marketed as a product has its origins in two distinct developments in the history of U.S. higher education: the philosophy of educational experience proposed by John Dewey, and the relation between educational administrations and business interests critiqued by Thorstein Veblen. These developments emerged in the very early twentieth century and remain intertwined; indeed, since the 1990s, the second has taken on new life, enfolding the fi rst into an education product. Strong (this volume) lays out Dewey's belief in a mutually integrative and informative relation between education and experience, with practical activity leading to re-fl ection and enhanced understanding. Contemporaneously, as Handler (this volume) points out, Veblen warned about the emergence of, as he put it, " captains of erudition " heading universities while working in tandem with the profi t-oriented businessmen (and they were in fact all men) who dominated boards of trustees, undercutting what Veblen saw
This article compares "official" college representations of race as diversity with narratives by ... more This article compares "official" college representations of race as diversity with narratives by students of color about racialized experience, with particular attention to the metasemiotic principles governing the first and the discursive organization of the second. Colleges and universities (like other contemporary organizations) represent race as a set of equally weighted, equally ordered demographic categories not explicitly differing in markedness, presented as if universal and deployed in accounts of institutional progress. Students of color (racially marked) talk about their experiences of race in relation to whiteness (unmarkedness). Colleges and universities rely on these students to provide the numbers for representations of progress but too often ignore the conditions that make their experiences so difficult, as those are also the conditions that match the habitus of the elite white students who constitute the school's primary market.
For students at elite US liberal arts colleges, symbolic capital accrues to their association wit... more For students at elite US liberal arts colleges, symbolic capital accrues to their association with the institution itself, and for racially unmarked (white) students, symbolic capital can also accrue to other, informal associations with such institutions, such as friend and family ties or social fraternities. For racially marked students at elite schools, sources of symbolic capital are more limited to institutional venues such as the classroom and official school organizations. They are under pressure to act as good campus citizens, to " bring diversity " as " campus leaders, " enacting a combination of institutional pride and neoliberal values as key aspects of their " diversity. " This is particularly the case for students whose educations are provided through the Posse Foundation, which recruits and promotes " diverse " students explicitly as " leaders " and " change agents. " Such students are subject to neoliberal interpellation (hailed to enact a specific subjectivity) in ways that unmarked students are not because their options for an acceptable racial subjectivity is limited to a narrow range of social performance. In this way, neoliberal subjectivity can exacerbate racial markedness.
When languages or ethnic/racial identities are imagined as neoliberal objects in corporate, gover... more When languages or ethnic/racial identities are imagined as neoliberal objects in corporate, government, and educational discourses, their worth is imagined in terms of 'added value.' Yet they emerge from social formations embedded in inequalities, reflecting the interplay of markedness and unmarkedness. People experience them chronotopically, meaningful relative to specific times, places, and relationships. But once language and identity become quantifiable units of diversity, they become subject to rhetorical packaging that eliminates any experiential specificity. Disconnected from context, language and social identity become available for use in institutional promotion and branding. Yet, though marketed in relation to neoliberalized personal properties like skills, the marketing potential of linguistic or social diversity is always subject to compromise by the echo of lived experience.
What people perceive as " a language " – a named entity – is abstracted from practices and notion... more What people perceive as " a language " – a named entity – is abstracted from practices and notions about those practices. People take for granted that language is somehow a " thing, " an objectively distinct and bounded entity. How languages come to be thus imagined indexes the conditions under which they are imagined. The articles in this issue illustrate various relations of language-imagining to the ongoing production of neoliberal subjectivity under conditions inflected by the pride-profit polarities, especially profit (Duchêne and Heller 2012). The themes that link these articles show the relation of the language under discussion to its languaged workers, how the language indexes the conditions of its deployment, and how the language is imagined. Entrepreneurialized language is fundamentally promotional, whether on a loose entrepreneur-network basis or following scripted policy or as a manifestation of cultural property. Thus imagined, language and language difference are subject to the same metasemiotic regime as are corporate-friendly interpretations of the national, ethnic, and racial differences represented by language difference. In other words, all forms of difference are " supposed " to be understood in terms of desirable contemporary business-friendly outcomes.
In neoliberalized labor discourses, workers are imagined as bundles of skills, some 'hard' (knowl... more In neoliberalized labor discourses, workers are imagined as bundles of skills, some 'hard' (knowledge and techniques) and some 'soft' (social abilities and characteristics). In such imagining, any attribute that can be imagined in terms of productive labor can be cast as a skill, including forms of social being. In particular, forms of social difference can be imagined as skills, including racial/ethnic markedness and language markedness, so long as they can be cast as providing corporate value. Forms of difference that would otherwise be interpretable as indices of race, ethnic or national identity are reimagined as properties belonging to individuals. Moreover, workers are in effect responsible for recasting their own markers of social disadvantage as markers of added value. By and large, language and race/ethnic differences operate in complement to each other in globalized labor regimes : language difference operating as 'hard' skills and social identity forms of 'diversity' operating as 'soft' skills.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Annual Review of Anthropology
How language is conceptualized as labor is a function of the economy within which profits are mad... more How language is conceptualized as labor is a function of the economy within which profits are made and businesses are structured. Under capitalist regimes, language practices have been conceptualized as apart from labor, as part of the means of production, and as the product. Under neoliberal regimes and conditions of globalization, and depending on the language worker's job description and status as managed or managing, ethnicity/race, gender, and affiliation with national or nonnational language practices are conceptualized as skills subject to Taylorization, as natural abilities for employers' occasional use, or as indexes of authenticity. What ties all this together is how language workers are imagined in relation to the organizations for which they work, a key element being the degree to which language labor represents an internalization of the organization. In this way, language labor is conceptualized in relation to agency as a technology of self.
Race: Are we so different? (AAA, eds Goodman, Moses and Jones)
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Jan 1, 2011
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Papers by Bonnie Urciuoli