Volume 2023, Issue 279 - Special Issue: Youth at the Margins: Ethnographic Perspectives on Language and Liminality; Issue Editors: Inmaculada García-Sánchez and Ariana Mangual Figueroa

Across the world, optimistic educational policy discourses promote early childhood education as a key strategy for combating poverty and for building bright futures for the most vulnerable members of society. Viewed from the ground up, this picture of early childhood education as a path to bright futures for all children is often belied by political and economic entrenchments. This article draws on a four-year ethnographic study of multiple classrooms in one Lebanese public kindergarten school that serves the most vulnerable children in Lebanon – Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian children who face daily the insecurities of poverty, displacement, and political violence. Drawing on anthropological theory that illustrates how social identities forged at the level of historical timescales are constructed and contested at the microlevel of everyday life, we pay particular attention to spatio-temporal liminal contexts within which children renounce productions of their own, their peers’, and their families’ marginality.

In this article we introduce the language practices of a group of Indigenous Maya students at an elementary school in northern California. We discuss how liminal experience in migration foregrounds an awareness of becoming and embodying multiple selves and of using multiple languages across the home, school, and community. Through an analysis of interview data from a three and a half-year ethnographic project at the school, we focus on two students’ strategies for learning and stewarding their Indigenous language. Their use and awareness of language offer examples of Indigenous resurgence and futurity as the young generation reclaims language in acts of transnational sovereignty. We argue that these students’ translanguaging practices represent their everyday actions as stewards of the language, and that in the process of learning their Indigenous language, these students enact forms of transnational sovereignty.

In this paper, I examine how liminal spatio-temporal contexts both afford and constrain how immigrant children navigate their social lives in educational settings. Liminal schooling contexts have largely been unexamined in micro-ethnographic approaches to schooling, despite the potential of these contexts for illuminating the educational lives of youth. Shifting the ethnographic lens to the interactions occurring in seemingly liminal schooling contexts (in between ratified activities, in between ratified places, etc.) reveal heightened forms of behavior at the extremes of a continuum ranging from empathy/inclusion to violence/exclusion. On the one hand, liminality can render immigrant youth more vulnerable to racialized bullying, including verbal and physical aggression, since many of the institutional protections that apply in ratified schooling contexts are in abeyance. On the other hand, liminal contexts also allow for displays of support and empathy that can lead to the development of cross-ethnic peer friendships, which can happen when social-ethnic boundaries and hierarchies that are reproduced in more central contexts are relaxed. This paper builds on a linguistic ethnography documenting the social lives of Moroccan immigrant children in a Southwestern Spanish town. Using videoanalysis and ethnographic methods in discourse analysis, I focus on videotaped interactions between immigrant students and their Spanish counterparts taking place in the interstices of school life – when students are walking between buildings, in the fringes/corners of the schoolyard, in between classes … etc. The long-term ethnography allows me to examine the interactions occurring in these liminal contexts in relation to institutional culture and to the relational history between children. This paper calls for examining youth’s schooling experiences more holistically. What happens in liminal contexts is crucial to achieving educational equity in the 21st century: it can, for example, undermine progressive curricular efforts and can have positive/negative implications for immigrant youth’s enduring feelings of belonging and educational enfranchisement.

This article examines how language, liminality, and social marginalization converge in the institutional lives of two displaced children in Angola. A displaced child is very likely to be placed into institutionalized care, which in Angola exists in the form of centros de acolhimento , residential centers that house minors affected by orphanhood, poverty, displacement, or abandonment. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in two residential centers, the article argues that despite being sites of care and protection, some children come to desire living on the street as a byproduct of persistent marginalization and forms of liminality in the institutions. Utilizing audiovisual recordings of everyday interactions among children and the center’s staff as data, the focus of the article is a set of communicative practices that routinely positioned certain children as liminal subjects who possessed the negative attributes with which liminality is most often associated: danger, pollution, and being an ambiguous nonentity. As a result, those children occupied marginalized positions within the centers and their attempts at claiming their belonging were repeatedly undermined. The lived experience, talk, and perspectives of two children, a boy and a girl, are closely analyzed to illuminate the micro-processes involved in the discursive production of their liminality and social marginality. More broadly, the article elucidates the everyday forms of liminality that take place in the mundane, rather than in ritualized rites of passage, and questions the traditional notion of liminality as a temporary state.

This paper focuses on political socialization in a conflict-affected context and looks at how young Greek-Cypriot learners of Turkish debated political positionings and engaged with political and conflict ideologies usually seen as part of the adult world. It draws on data from two linguistic ethnographic projects (2006–2009; 2012–2015) that analysed classroom observations and recordings of controversial Turkish-as-Foreign-Language (MFL) lessons in a Greek-Cypriot Secondary School. The paper employs the concept of liminality, which has been traditionally linked with transition, describing an in-between space, where normal rules, conventions and relations are suspended or transgressed, carrying the potential for the creation of new structures and creative performance. Moving away from romantised approaches to liminality as liberating from structures, the analysis looks “inside liminality” for alternative or enduring patterns and conventions and reveals the affordances and limitations of liminal-like experiences in education settings, and their potential role in young people’s political socialization. Approaching children/teenagers as youthful political agents, the paper analyses first the multiple liminal social and political spaces that young learners of Turkish occupied; then, it focuses particularly on an interactional event, when the usual lesson structures and procedures of the language lesson were suspended, looking at how students, in this liminal-like moment, mobilized knowledge and recourses to form and debate political subjectivities and dominant political ideologies. The analysis points to the resilience of conflict discourses and discourses of othering but it also reveals youngsters’ attempts to articulate a political discourse that introduces new discursive frames for the discussion of social and political relations in a post-conflict manner. This has important implications for young people’s political socialization in conflict-affected contexts, revealing the role that language plays in this process.

This paper brings contemporary scholarship on youth migration, Indigeneity, race, and language into conversation with formative work on liminality and rites of passage. Drawing on six years’ worth of participant observation and interviews with L1 Maya (primarily K’iche’) speaking Guatemalan youth workers in Los Angeles, we theorize the transformations that characterize urban immigrant life for Indigenous Latinxs in the contemporary United States as a passage through the liminal state from separation to consummation. We first analyze participants’ language behavior during the separation phase following migration, when youth sought to defend themselves from anti-Indigenous harm and discrimination through discourse practices such as cloaking or denying Maya proficiency, claiming to be Mexican or non-Indigenous Guatemalan, or avoiding speaking Spanish or K’iche’ in public. Participants also employed techniques of bodily concealment that were believed to make them less racially identifiable in physical terms. As time went on, youth felt less of a need to defend themselves from stigmas attached to Indigeneity and Guatemalan identity and began to consider possibilities for expressing ethnic and linguistic pride in communal settings. This reflection was enabled by youth’s growing embeddedness in Los Angeles’s multicultural society along with coethnic small group settings that valorized Indigeneity and invited youth to compare their trajectories to those of other immigrant groups. We acknowledge the distinctive challenges that Indigenous youth encounter as immigrants to the US. However, our findings point beyond Indigenous Latinxs’ post-migration experiences of shame, fear, and discrimination to possibilities for language maintenance and cultural pride in the context of long-term sobrevivencia, or survival, in diaspora.

Language vitality and endangerment theorizing and research have been focused mainly on whole languages, relegating their individual dialects to the background, on the one hand; and on using single scales in assessing vitality and endangerment, on the other. In this paper, however, we advocate a paradigm shift for more, better successes in this undertaking. Therefore, we aim to examine the degree(s) of vitality and endangerment of Gombe dialect of Fulfulde using multiple evaluative scales, both western and non-western. Prior to placing the dialect on these scales, we collected data from Fulfulde speakers of varied age ranges, all Gombe radio stations and listeners of their Fulfulde programs, using ‘insider’ participant observations, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a proficiency test component (after which both the respondents and the researchers agreed on the proficiency levels of the former) and online surveys. Analysis of the data reveals that the vitality of this code is better viewed relatively rather than absolutely. Its subsequent placement on the evaluative scales only helps to corroborate this. Finally, while our analysis shows that dialects are just as place-able on these evaluative scales as whole languages are (notwithstanding the hitches characterizing the scales), we argue that, with sustained collective efforts, a dialect-focused evaluative framework is likely to be born in the foreseeable future.

This study examines how the use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese is becoming enregistered as a feature that marks Santomeans’ national identity. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semistructured interviews with Santomeans living on São Tomé Island and in Portugal. The qualitative analysis of the data reveals the process that leads to the use and awareness of the rhotic feature among Santomeans. This increasing awareness is analysed in terms of orders of indexicality. The author suggests that awareness of this rhotic feature among Santomeans is contingent on having contact with Portuguese speakers of non-Santomean origin, as they only become aware of their distinctive use of rhotics when they are in contact with speakers of another variety of Portuguese on the island, in the diaspora, or online. Also, even if this feature is perceived negatively by many, it remains available for identity-driven use to express a connection to São Tomé and Príncipe.