What is the relationship among migration, education, and socio-emotional well-being? This article draws on ethnographic research with Dominican youth to examine the impact of maternal migration on young immigrants and their educational aspirations. We detail how the youth come to conflate mother love, the sacrifices of migration, and educational…

How can scholars trace the global production and circulation of educational policies? The vertical case study incorporates three elements: "vertical" attention across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, or scales; a "horizontal" comparison of how policies unfold in distinct locations; and a "transversal," processual…

This article considers contemporary policy claims about "what literacy is" and "what literacy does." First, the article reviews in-depth the ways in which development discourses define literacy, and the claims made in development discourses about the "consequences" of literacy for economic and political development. I…

This article elaborates the concept of educational projects, a term that signifies consistent constellations of institutions, financial resources, social actors, ideologies, theories of knowledge and attendant pedagogies that shape local cultural practices of schooling. The article demonstrates the utility of the concept of educational projects…

Using the concept of figured worlds, this article demonstrates how the faculty, staff, and students of Gregorio Luperon High School in New York City figured "success" by prioritizing the students' linguistic and cultural resources. "Success" was constructed specifically through granting Spanish high status, developing positive…

This article examines the relationship between shame, literacy and social relations by analyzing shame narratives told to the author by youth and adult literacy students during a 24-month ethnographic research project conducted in two Brazilian cities. Employing Bourdieu's theoretical framework and literature from the anthropology of emotions, the…

Background/Context: This study draws upon and contributes to sociocultural studies of literacy (a.k.a. New Literacy Studies), sociohistorical theories of identity formation, and practice theories of language interaction to argue that "becoming literate" requires critical inter- and intra-personal identity work accomplished through…

Background/Context: In the field of educational research, conventional wisdom holds that primary-level schooling, specifically literacy acquisition, promotes economic mobility for individuals and economic development for the nation. This belief is rooted in human capital theory, the causal argument claiming that state investment in schooling or…

Suggests that the 1980s neoliberal renaissance marketized education, with negative social consequences. Examines the emergence and promotion of a national-level discourse that positioned schools in the service of the economy. Ethnographic research shows how local growth elite utilized this discourse to further their own race and class interests,…

Paulo Freire's revolutionary theory of pedagogy has influenced progressive educational practice and inspired educational activism around the world. Many contemporary nonformal educational efforts are deeply influenced by Freire's work. In Latin America approaches that draw on Freire's pedagogy are broadly known as popular education, while in the…