Skip to main content

surviving AERA

i went to a big conference, of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). it was tiring and overwhelming, i don't know how many people were there. tens of thousands. it's the one everyone says we (grad students) have to present papers at - so i presented a paper.

met great people, learned and partied with them. saw carol lee shake her groove thing.

i submitted the same paper last year, but it was rejected. so i fixed the things reviewers didn't like, and this year they accepted it. appreciate criticism.

by the way, AERA finally has an opinion about something.
education is part of our world. how did they make it through the 20th century without any "political" opinions (eugenics, fascism, genocide, internment camps, mccarthyism, jim crow, voter literacy tests, brown v. board, nclb, etc.)?

my title:
Undocumented Paradox: Activist Immigrants and the California Dream Act

my abstract:
IDEAS is UCLA’s undocumented student support group. My ethnography follows our planning of a conference on immigrant rights legislation. How do undocumented immigrants engage politically? This conference responded to opponents - Schwarzenegger had expressed sympathy, but vetoed legislation; ICE deported families; schools said “you’re not even supposed to be here” and seized merit scholarships, regardless of academic excellence. Students struggled with rent and tuition, so financial workshops were developed for our conference. Though politically influential, these activist immigrants cannot vote. “What sense does it make to keep them disenfranchised?” Against odds, IDEAS members succeed at UCLA by emulating Freirean ideals. IDEAS’ political engagement is unique in student leadership. These “illegal” American college students contest nativist versions of the American Dream.
my PowerPoint (with no speaking or music; i recommend los dynamite):
undocumented_paradox.ppt

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Refugees in Europe deserve help, but refugees in U.S. deserve to "be sent back"?

--> September 4, 2015 Hillary Clinton on the refugee crisis in Southern Europe:   “Well the pictures, well the stories, we’ve been watching this terrible assault on the Syrian people now for years, are just heartbreaking. I think the entire world has to come together, it should not be just one or two countries, or not just Europe and the United States. We should do our part, as should the Europeans, but this is a broader, global crisis.   We now have um, more refugees than we’ve had, in many years, I think since the second world war. And as we’ve seen tragically, people are literally dying to escape the conflict in Syria. Uh, I think that the, the larger Middle East, I think Asia, I think everybody should step up and say we have to help these people. And I would hope that, under the aegis of the United Nations led by the Security Council, and certainly by the United States which has been such a generous nation in the past, we would begin to try to...
10 comments
Read more

Jared Kushner & the Meritocracy

Congratulations to Jared Kushner for getting the federal government to cover a well-deserved $800 million loan! This is such a feel-good story, showing our meritocracy at work: As a child, Jared's family ran a small business of owning 25,000 apartment units. They barely scraped by on less than $100 million income per year. The Kushners were forced to live off of government assistance, via the rent received from their low-income tenants. When it was time to apply for college, Jared didn't have the advantages of other applicants. For example, he wasn't a great student, his GPA was low, and he got a bad score on the SAT. It was only by a stroke of luck that Jared's dad Charles cobbled together a $2.5 million donation to Harvard. Just in time to get him a spot.  Yet even with a Harvard degree and Ivy League connections, poor Jared didn't find anyone willing to hire him! Except for his dad. So, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and took an entry-level positio...
1 comment
Read more

translation of the Manu Chao song "Me Llaman Calle"

this is about my translation of the Manu Chao song "Me Llaman Calle." [ video below ] i'm reasonably close to a literal translation, with changes to fit the rhythm and number of syllables per line. "baldosa" is like ladrilla (a brick to build a house) except flat like a tile. based on context, i translate it as "cobblestones." Chao also uses "maquinita," literally "little machine," but this implies a small device in english (a machine that does something, but does not move itself - such as a laminating machine, a blood-glucose meter, or an ATM) - so i use "little engine" instead, to imply movement. the one line i'm not happy with is the translation of "no me rebajo"; if i wasn't worried about rhythm, i would translate it as "it doesn't dig ruts into me." the tricky part is that this word, rut, is almost never used as a present-tense transitive verb in english. we generally use it as a noun (...
3 comments
Read more