Böcker av Neriko Musha Doerr

"Incompetence" is not an objective state lacking competence nor a kind of deficiency that needs to be filled. Rather, it is a constructed state that is productive, working in tandem with its opposite, "competence." Perception of incompetence/competence is what Michel Foucault (1977) calls a technology of "normalization" that pushes individuals to aspire to follow a shared norm, while hierarchically differentiating individuals according to their proximity to the aspired norm. The notion of incompetence is thus "productive" in that it turns individuals into specific kinds of "subjects" (Foucault 1977). The Politics of Incompetence: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance further investigates other productive processes around the perception of "incompetence" specifically through its intersections with various ideologies--"academic achievement," teacher-student hierarchy, "native speaker" ideology, normative unit thinking, and privilege of vulnerability--as such intersections generate new knowledge, new reflection on one's assumptions and privilege, new space for marginalized language, and more. This volume opens up a new area of study--productive cultural politics of "incompetence"--by focusing on language learning in diverse contexts: Japanese-as-a-Second-Language classrooms in US colleges, Italian language tourism in Italy, and indigenous Māori language revitalization at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school.

Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj A iA ek's notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin's notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: "e;tinted glasses"e;, through which we see the world; "e;unit-thinking"e;, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and "e;coherants"e;, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change.

School differentiates students-and provides differential access to various human and material resources-along a range of axes: from elected subjects and academic "e;achievement"e; to ethnicity, age, gender, or the language they speak. These categorizations, affected throughout the world by neoliberal reforms that prioritize market forces in transforming educational institutions, are especially stark in societies that recognize their bi- or multicultural makeup through bilingual education. A small town in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with its contemporary shift toward official biculturalism and extensive free-marketization of schooling, is a prime example. Set in the microcosm of a secondary school with a bilingual program, this important volume closely examines not only the implications of categorizing individuals in ethnic terms in their everyday life but also the shapes and meaning of education within the discourse of academic achievement. It is an essential resource for those interested in bilingual education and its effects on the formations of subjectivities, ethnic relations, and nationhood.

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including "e;the global/national,"e; "e;culture,"e; "e;native speaker,"e; "e;immersion,"e; and "e;host society."e; Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersion, it reframes study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others but as an occasion to analyze constructions of "e;differences"e; in daily life, backgrounded by structural arrangements.