Unresolved Identities: Discourse, Ambivalence, and Urban Immigrant Students

by Bic Ngo, Deborah P. Britzman

Overview

In her ethnographic study of Lao American students at an urban, public high school, Bic Ngo shows how simplistic accounts of these students smooth over unfinished, precarious identities and contested social relations. Exploring the ways that immigrant youth identities are shaped by dominant discourses that simplify and confine their experiences within binary categories of good/bad, traditional/modern and success/failure, she unmasks and examines the stories we tell about them, and unsettles the hegemony of discourses that frame identities within discrete dualisms. Rather than cohesive, the identity negotiations of Lao American students are responses that modify, resist, or echo these discourses. Ngo argues that while Lao American students are changing what it means to be "urban" and "immigrant" youth, most people are unable to read them as doing so, and instead see the youth as confused, backward, and problematic. By illuminating the discursive practices of identity, this study underscores the need to conceptualize urban, immigrant identities as contradictory, fractured and unresolved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438430584
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Series:	SUNY series, Second Thoughts: New Theoretical Formations
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Bic Ngo is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota and coeditor (with Kevin K. Kumashiro) of Six Lenses for Anti-Oppressive Education: Partial Stories, Improbable Conversations.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Urban Schools as War Zones 23

Chapter 3 War Babies and Comeback Kids 37

Chapter 4 Confining Immigrant Identities 53

Chapter 5 Unresolved Identities 73

Chapter 6 Resisting Resolution 95

Appendix A Undercutting the Inside/Outside Opposition 111

Appendix B A Note on Methodology 123

Notes 129

References 133

Index 141