Jin Sook Lee, a professor in the Department of Education at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, along with Mary Bucholtz, a UCSB Professor in Linguistics and Gevirtz School affiliated faculty member, have edited the just released Feeling It: Language, Race, and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge 2018) with Dolores Inés Casillas, an associate professor in Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCSB. Feeling It brings together twelve chapters from researchers in Chicanx studies, education, feminist studies, linguistics, and translation studies to offer a cohesive yet broad-ranging exploration of the issue of affect in the language and learning experiences of Latinx youth.
Five of the chapters are authored by alumni or current students of the Gevirtz School’s Department of Education: Liz Mainz (Ph.D. ’16), Meghan Corella (Ph.D. ’16), Zuleyma Carruba-Rogel (Ph.D. ’16), Tijana Hirsch (Ph.D. ’17), and Maria Aragon (current student).
Drawing on data from an innovative social justice-oriented university-community partnership based in young people’s social agency and their linguistic and cultural expertise, the contributors are unified by their focus on a single year in the history of this partnership; their analytic focus on race, language, and affect in educational contexts; and their shared commitment to ethnography, discourse analysis, and qualitative methods, informed by participatory and social justice paradigms for research with youth of color.
All proceeds from the book will be donated to funding SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society) so that the program can reach more schools and students. SKILLS—a collaboration between UCSB faculty and students and master teachers in high school classes in Santa Barbara County—is the first program to teach linguistics in California’s public schools. It prepares and motivates students for higher education by giving them hands-on experience in studying language and culture. SKILLS puts students at the center of linguistic discovery by guiding them through the process of carrying out original research on language use in their own peer groups, families, and communities.
“In a time of heightened anti-immigrant policies and exclusionary discourses in the public sphere, Feeling It humanizes the experiences of Latinx youth and their families,” writes Patricia Baquedano-López, Associate Professor in the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. “Through an inspired collection of new voices in social justice oriented research, the book models how to integrate affect, language, and race in teaching and learning.”