Preface Introduction 1. Fact and fiction in language learning 2. Researching identity and language learning 3. The world of adult immigrant language learners 4. Eva and Mai: Old heads on young shoulders 5. Mothers, migration and language learning 6. Second language acquisition theory revisited 7. Claiming the right to speak in classrooms and communities Afterword by Claire Kramsch

Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation

PurposeMedical educators have expressed concern that students’ professional identities do not always align with their expectations or with professional standards. The authors propose that, in constructing appropriate professional identities, medical students today are affected by the competing disco

"I am a doctor": negotiating the discourses of standardization and diversity in professional identity construction.

This paper proposes the need to move beyond current integration and diversity discourses (and their practices). It argues that whilst purportedly aiming to attack social divisions, on the one hand, these are underpinned by binary and essentialized constructions of these very divisions, on the other. They thereby reinforce notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In order to retain their more progressive concerns with heterogeneity and inclusion, the paper brings into focus an intersectional approach that considers the complex and irreducible nature of belonging and social hierarchy. The paper also considers the potential of notions of solidarity and interculturalism in dealing with some of the social issues involved.

Moving beyond the Janus Face of Integration and Diversity Discourses: Towards an Intersectional Framing:

https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/31936962/1_s2.0_S1462901117302587_main.pdf

Sustainability transitions in the developing world: Challenges of socio-technical transformations unfolding in contexts of poverty

The linkage between race and migration, especially in the UK since the 1990s, has shifted from a focus on postcolonial migrants to focus on newer groups, while migration within the European Union has also altered the discussion of racism and migration. This critical review provides a framework for understanding how race is conceptualized (or ignored) in contemporary scholarship on migration. We identify three, partly overlapping nexi between migration and racialization: (1) ‘Changing Migrations – Continuities of Racism’; (2) ‘Complex Migrations – Differentialist Racialization’; (3) ‘Post-racial Migrations – Beyond Racism’. The article analyses what each of these nexi bring into focus as well as what they neglect. The concept of race–migration nexus aids a fuller understanding of how migration and contemporary racialization are co-constructed. Scholars need to consider the relationship between migration and race to better address pressing issues of racism against migrants and settled communities.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01419870.2016.1161808

Understanding the contemporary race–migration nexus

Now I think that being is in a state of perpetual change. And what I call creolisation is the very sign of that change. In creolisation, you can change, you can be with the Other, you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple . . .- Edouard GlissantIN THE AFTERMATH OF THE LONDON RIOTS of August 2011, British historian David Starkey provoked a storm of public outrage when, in a discussion on BBC Television on the cause of the riots, he stated that "the problem is that whites have become black . . . What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs have become black."1 Starkey's comment was condemned by black and white pundits alike, primarily because his attempt to explain the participation of white youths - "chavs" - in the rioting and looting invoked racist stereotypes of unruly/riotous black youth.2 Furthermore, Starkey's reference to chavs, a white, urban working-class subculture whose male members adopt so-called gangster fashions and street slang, also invokes the menacing, stereotypical spectre of black male criminality, thought to influence the style and behaviours of chavs.Louise Bennett's poem "Colonization in Reverse", written in the 1950s, commented satirically and prophetically on the influential presence of West Indians who emigrated to Britain in the years following the end of World War II.3 Her observations in this poem anticipated Starkey's remarks by several decades. This essay, focusing on literary representations of West Indians in London, examines the implications of the surprising convergence of views expressed by Starkey and by Bennett, specifically their allusions to what Starkey described as the "blackening" of white Britons, and what Bennett described as "colonization in reverse".Under consideration is the high period of twentieth-century West Indian immigration, bracketed in the West Indian literature of immigration by Samuel Selvon's 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners4 and Zadie Smith's 2001 novel White Teeth.5 In the intervening forty-five years, a canon of West Indian writing, as well as other creative expressions, emerged, with representations of immigration experiences that included arrival, the embattled process of settlement and the struggle for social acceptance, and the particular challenges of the second generation.Drawing on representations of relations between West Indian immigrants and British natives in literature published in the latter half of the twentieth century, this essay focuses on two broad phases of West Indian immigration, settlement, and social interaction with Britons in London, and comments on developments that would support Starkey's and Bennett's claims. The first period spans 1948, the year the passenger ship the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Southampton, to 1981, the year of the Brixton and Tottenham uprisings, which marked a turning point in black politics in London and in the country as a whole. In the phase that followed, 1981-2001, black identities forged in the preceding decades by the processes of settlement, adaptation and inter-racial relationships - identities categorised by Stuart Hall as new ethnicities - emerged, to be embraced and consolidated by some second-, thirdand even first-generation West Indians, or rejected by others who cleaved to a remembered, rather than lived West Indianness.6To elucidate observations derived from the creative literature, this essay also draws on contemporaneous criticism produced by British scholars in the disciplines of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, as well as migration studies, and on theories of creolisation from the disciplines of sociology and history.The postwar periodThe first wave of West Indian migrants comprised predominantly young men escaping economic hardship at home by responding to the promise of jobs in the postwar reconstruction of London. But by the late 1950s, women were arriving in increasingly greater numbers to take jobs in the new National Health Service hospitals and on London transport. …

Ifeona Fulani

Papers

New Ethnicities: Literary Representations of West Indians in London, 1948-2001