Browsing by Subject "Ethnic Studies"

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    Amplifying Counternarratives: Institutionally Supported Student Voice(s) and the Impacts on E12 Practices & Policies
    (2022-05) Walsh, Shaun
    Over the past two decades, efforts to amplify student voice have proliferated as a project or process to increase institutional engagement with young people. Institutionally supported student voice is generally distinguished from, yet not independent of, student activism and youth activism. The designs, outcomes, and impacts of student voice efforts vary across institutions and systems. In many instances, young people are tokenized by student voice efforts that essentialize “student” as a monolithic identity, dictate adult-controlled input, and lack power-sharing. In other spaces, efforts to systematically amplify student voices actively resist essentialization and tokenization while attempting to collaboratively build inclusive institutional policy and practices. In rare moments, institutionally supported efforts to include student voice may facilitate a strategic disruption of existing power structures, whereby young people and adults co-construct meaning to dismantle systemic educational oppression. This paper assumes that the goal of institutionally supported student voice projects is not simply to increase student engagement but rather to proactively alter the logic and system of schooling. Existing literature falls short of examining the dynamics of student voice by essentializing student subjectivity and maintaining binary concepts of power.Through a unique case study of an institutionally supported student voice effort, this paper analyzes constructions, intentions and perceived impacts of publicly presented student counternarratives. This paper applies relationality, as the embedded theoretical framework to provide greater insight into the complexity of institutionally supported student voice(s) as a response to, or interruption of, schooling as a saturated site of power. This study illuminates how one counternarrative can be carried forward, re-told, amplified and re-framed to challenge multiple aspects of schooling as a saturated site of power. Further, findings from this study suggest that amplifying student voices through institutionally supported structures, coupled with adult willingness to share power, can influence change toward more equitable, inclusive and just educational institutions.
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    Korean looks, American eyes: Korean American adoptees, race, culture and nation.
    (2009-12) Park Nelson, Kim Ja
    This project positions Korean adoptees as transnational citizens at intersections within race relations in the United States, as emblems of international geopolitical relationships between the United States and South Korea, and as empowered actors, organizing to take control of racial and cultural discourses about Korean adoption. I make connections between transnational exchanges, American race relations, and Asian American experiences. I argue that though the contradictory experience of Korean adoptees, at once inside and outside bounded racial and national categories of "Asian," "White," "Korean," and "American," the limits of these categories may be explored and critiqued. In understanding Korean adoptees as transnational subjects, single-axis racial and national identity are challenged, where individuals have access to membership and/or face exclusion in more than one political or cultural nation. In addition, this work demonstrates the effects of American political and cultural imperialism both abroad and domestically, by elucidating how the acts of empire-building nations are mapped onto individuals though the regulation of immigration and family formation. My methods are interdisciplinary, drawing from traditions that include ethnography, primary historical sources, and literature. My dissertation work uses Korean adoptees' own life stories that I have collected and recorded in three locations: 1) Minnesota, home to the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the U.S.; 2) the Pacific Northwest, home to the many of the "first wave" of the oldest living Korean adoptees now in their 40s and 50s; and, 3) Seoul, Korea, home to hundreds of adult Korean adoptees who have traveled back to South Korea to live and work. In addition, I use Korean adoptee published narratives, archive materials documenting the early history of transnational adoption, and secondary sources in sociology, social work, psychology and cultural studies to uncover the many layers of national, racial and cultural belonging and significance for and of Korean adoptees.