Chaise Ladousa
Biographic Data
| ID | 111124 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chaise Ladousa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chaise |
| FAMILY NAME | Ladousa |
| SIGNATURE | LADOUSA C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hamilton College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8172-2122 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 160 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
"The agency of "doing something: Ethnographic research on subject positions at predominantly White institutions
A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the promotion and proliferation of a discourse of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article considers projects emergent from a summer research fellowship offered to groups of faculty members and students. We compare the ways in which the group of students led by us and the group of students led by another set of faculty developed questions and explore…
Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India
A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities. The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India. Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and the…
South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media
Scholars such as Murray Emeneau and John Gumperz made India prominent in the development of sociolinguistics as a field of study through their simultaneous attention to difference and cohesiveness. Later, scholars stressed the ideological mediation of practice, especially the importance of colonial constructions that continue to be relevant in the postcolonial period. Work on specific notions such as mother tongue and medium of instruction, and t…
Postcolonial Language Ideologies: Indian Students Reflect on Mother Tongue and English
The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) proposes a revision to the Indian education system. The document foregrounds "mother tongue," a concept that has been highly salient in India since the mid-nineteenth century, by specifying that students should learn in it. But it makes little mention of English, despite its importance, and the desire for it, at every level of education. The construction of nation and language in the NEP begs a question: h…
Literacy
Literacy constitutes a domain of great interest in anthropology. A peculiarity of the interest in literacy in the discipline is the great importance of a single publication by Jack Goody and Ian Watt in 1963. Some scholars have engaged in overt critiques of the publication while others have provided examples of alternative methodological approaches and theoretical insights. Overt critiques often have been launched outside of anthropology such tha…
Language and Education
Anthropologists have found in language and education a relationship particularly important in the study of inequality and its reproduction. They have shown that interactional patterns in many communities, especially stigmatized and underserved ones, differ from those found in most classrooms. More recently, anthropologists have explored the intersection of language and education in contexts characterized by postcolonialism, indigeneity, minority …
Language, Script, and Advertising in India’s Hindi Belt: Institutional Voices in Flux
Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic ch…
Introduction: Sign and Script in South Asia
This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. R…
Introduction: Language and schooling in India and Sri Lanka: Language medium matters
This article introduces a special issue of theInternational Journal of the Sociology of Languagefocused on the topic of language medium, pervasive in the nations comprising South Asia. This introduction provides a brief overview of sociolinguistic scholarship on education in India and Sri Lanka, a short sketch of the phenomenon of language-medium schooling, a review of the articles included in the special issue, and a summary of the theoretical c…
The gendered significance of the language-medium divide: Moments of Discursive Empowerment and Dis-Empowerment
Language medium and a high-stakes test: Language ideology and coaching centers in North India
The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) offers its set of examinations in a "medium", whether in a language recognized by the Constitution of India or in English. The notion of medium in the examination borrows from the notion of medium in schooling where it refers to the primary language of pedagogy. Although not all students who have studied in a particular medium in school and university go on to attempt the UPSC examinations in the same me…
Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured World of a Literacy Welcome Center
The GED test has served as a mechanism for granting high school equivalency in the United States for decades, and some states have funded tutorial services because they have imagined the GED to be a means for getting a job or increasing one's wages. Based on field research conducted in literacy welcome centers in a small city in Upstate New York, we argue that teachers' and students' discursive reflections show that they attain agency in multiple…
Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation
Bakhtin's concept of addressivity affords an investigation of why my students and I were frustrated by the seeming lack of a connection between our participation in a self-tutorial in preparation for a digital literacy initiative, on the one hand, and the benefits of the acquisition of digital literacy, on the other hand. More than one structure of addressivity emerged from the tutorial, such that my students and I found the one that provided clu…
Language Management/Labor
How language is conceptualized as labor is a function of the economy within which profits are made and businesses are structured. Under capitalist regimes, language practices have been conceptualized as apart from labor, as part of the means of production, and as the product. Under neoliberal regimes and conditions of globalization, and depending on the language worker's job description and status as managed or managing, ethnicity/race, gender, a…
On mother and other tongues: Sociolinguistics, schools, and language ideology in northern India
Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius by Patrick Eisenlohr
Decolonisation, globalisation: Language-in-education policy and practice. Angel M. Y. Lin and Peter W. Martin (eds) (2005)
Decolonisation, globalisation: Language-in-education policy and practice. Angel M. Y. Lin and Peter W. Martin (eds) (2005) Multilingual Matters xix+204pp. ISBN 1-85359-824-0
Liberalisation, privatisation, modernisation, and schooling in India: An interview with Krishna Kumar
In 2004, India’s Congress Party wrested control of parliament from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. I present below an interview conducted with Professor Krishna Kumar, Delhi University, the new Government’s choice for Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training. Professor Kumar discusses the ways that liberalisation, privatisation and modernisation complexly interact in late twentieth and early twenty‐first…
Witty House Name: Visual Expression, Interpretive Practice, and Uneven Agency in a Midwestern College Town
Many students living in a college town located in the Midwest of the United States have put up large signs on the houses in which they reside. The signs' messages such as "Hangover Here," "Crammed Inn," and "Syc-a-College" create puns drawing on multiple domains of meaning from student or local life, including locations, institutions, and popular film or music titles. This article considers the different meanings and purposes of house signs as en…
Of Nation and State: Language, School, and the Reproduction of Disparity in a North Indian City
Banaras, a city located in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, offers its residents many types of schools for pre-university education. This article argues that only some schools, those bifurcated by a distinction between ones that utilize Hindi and ones that utilize English, cater to those people who belong to what a large number of media venues and scholars call India's "new middle class." By using the growingly salient notion of language …
Living with Multiple Languages: Multilingualism, Identity, and Belonging
The English–Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice. Vaidehi Ramanathan. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 2005. Pp. xii+143. ISBN 1 85359 770 8 (hbk): £44.95. ISBN 1 85359 769 4 (pbk): £17.95
The Discursive Malleability of an Identity
This article employs a dialogic approach, in the parlance of Bakhtin, to explore the ways in which a school smedium,its primary language of instruction, has become a major category of identity in North India. Many people describe themselves and others by invoking attendance at either a Hindi- or English-medium school. The first task of this article is to account for what Bakhtin callscentripetal forcesthat enable people at different positions in …
Invitations to love: Literacy, love letters, and social change in Nepal
Laura Ahearn , Invitations to love: Literacy, love letters, and social change in Nepal . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 295. Pb $24.95. “Sarita, I'm helpless....” Laura Ahearn begins her ethnography with a love letter, 21-year-old Bir Bahadur's first to Sarita, “whose long, black hair, fashionable Punjabi outfits, and demure giggles had caught his eye” (p. 3). Ahearn ponders the increasing use of such letters amid changes…
Disparate markets: Language, nation, and education in North India
In this article, I explore the ideological underpinnings of the Indian government's language policies in the school setting, and I investigate why they fail to be compelling to residents of Banaras, a city in North India. The multiple language markets that exist in India are incommensurate and subvert the government's language policies in multiple ways. By exploring the uneven quality of these markets, this article illustrates the especially comp…
In the mouth but not on the map
Language Management/Labor
How language is conceptualized as labor is a function of the economy within which profits are made and businesses are structured. Under capitalist regimes, language practices have been conceptualized as apart from labor, as part of the means of production, and as the product. Under neoliberal regimes and conditions of globalization, and depending on the language worker's job description and status as managed or managing, ethnicity/race, gender, a…
Disparate markets: Language, nation, and education in North India
In this article, I explore the ideological underpinnings of the Indian government's language policies in the school setting, and I investigate why they fail to be compelling to residents of Banaras, a city in North India. The multiple language markets that exist in India are incommensurate and subvert the government's language policies in multiple ways. By exploring the uneven quality of these markets, this article illustrates the especially comp…
Advertising in the periphery: Languages and schools in a North Indian city
Written school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular di…
In the mouth but not on the map
Postcolonial Language Ideologies: Indian Students Reflect on Mother Tongue and English
The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) proposes a revision to the Indian education system. The document foregrounds "mother tongue," a concept that has been highly salient in India since the mid-nineteenth century, by specifying that students should learn in it. But it makes little mention of English, despite its importance, and the desire for it, at every level of education. The construction of nation and language in the NEP begs a question: h…
Liberalisation, privatisation, modernisation, and schooling in India: An interview with Krishna Kumar
In 2004, India’s Congress Party wrested control of parliament from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. I present below an interview conducted with Professor Krishna Kumar, Delhi University, the new Government’s choice for Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training. Professor Kumar discusses the ways that liberalisation, privatisation and modernisation complexly interact in late twentieth and early twenty‐first…
The Discursive Malleability of an Identity
This article employs a dialogic approach, in the parlance of Bakhtin, to explore the ways in which a school smedium,its primary language of instruction, has become a major category of identity in North India. Many people describe themselves and others by invoking attendance at either a Hindi- or English-medium school. The first task of this article is to account for what Bakhtin callscentripetal forcesthat enable people at different positions in …
South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media
Scholars such as Murray Emeneau and John Gumperz made India prominent in the development of sociolinguistics as a field of study through their simultaneous attention to difference and cohesiveness. Later, scholars stressed the ideological mediation of practice, especially the importance of colonial constructions that continue to be relevant in the postcolonial period. Work on specific notions such as mother tongue and medium of instruction, and t…
Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation
Bakhtin's concept of addressivity affords an investigation of why my students and I were frustrated by the seeming lack of a connection between our participation in a self-tutorial in preparation for a digital literacy initiative, on the one hand, and the benefits of the acquisition of digital literacy, on the other hand. More than one structure of addressivity emerged from the tutorial, such that my students and I found the one that provided clu…
On mother and other tongues: Sociolinguistics, schools, and language ideology in northern India
Of Nation and State: Language, School, and the Reproduction of Disparity in a North Indian City
Banaras, a city located in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, offers its residents many types of schools for pre-university education. This article argues that only some schools, those bifurcated by a distinction between ones that utilize Hindi and ones that utilize English, cater to those people who belong to what a large number of media venues and scholars call India's "new middle class." By using the growingly salient notion of language …
Introduction: Sign and Script in South Asia
This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. R…
Language, Script, and Advertising in India’s Hindi Belt: Institutional Voices in Flux
Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic ch…
Introduction: Language and schooling in India and Sri Lanka: Language medium matters
This article introduces a special issue of theInternational Journal of the Sociology of Languagefocused on the topic of language medium, pervasive in the nations comprising South Asia. This introduction provides a brief overview of sociolinguistic scholarship on education in India and Sri Lanka, a short sketch of the phenomenon of language-medium schooling, a review of the articles included in the special issue, and a summary of the theoretical c…
Witty House Name: Visual Expression, Interpretive Practice, and Uneven Agency in a Midwestern College Town
Many students living in a college town located in the Midwest of the United States have put up large signs on the houses in which they reside. The signs' messages such as "Hangover Here," "Crammed Inn," and "Syc-a-College" create puns drawing on multiple domains of meaning from student or local life, including locations, institutions, and popular film or music titles. This article considers the different meanings and purposes of house signs as en…
Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (review)
Reviewed by: Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India Chaise LaDousa Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. By Purnima Mankekar. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Purnima Mankekar’s Screening Culture, Viewing Politics draws on the historiography and contemporary refractions of colonialism to produce a r…
Advertising in the periphery: Languages and schools in a North Indian city
Written school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular di…
In the mouth but not on the map
Invitations to love: Literacy, love letters, and social change in Nepal
Laura Ahearn , Invitations to love: Literacy, love letters, and social change in Nepal . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 295. Pb $24.95. “Sarita, I'm helpless....” Laura Ahearn begins her ethnography with a love letter, 21-year-old Bir Bahadur's first to Sarita, “whose long, black hair, fashionable Punjabi outfits, and demure giggles had caught his eye” (p. 3). Ahearn ponders the increasing use of such letters amid changes…
Disparate markets: Language, nation, and education in North India
In this article, I explore the ideological underpinnings of the Indian government's language policies in the school setting, and I investigate why they fail to be compelling to residents of Banaras, a city in North India. The multiple language markets that exist in India are incommensurate and subvert the government's language policies in multiple ways. By exploring the uneven quality of these markets, this article illustrates the especially comp…
Living with Multiple Languages: Multilingualism, Identity, and Belonging
The English–Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice. Vaidehi Ramanathan. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 2005. Pp. xii+143. ISBN 1 85359 770 8 (hbk): £44.95. ISBN 1 85359 769 4 (pbk): £17.95
The Discursive Malleability of an Identity
This article employs a dialogic approach, in the parlance of Bakhtin, to explore the ways in which a school smedium,its primary language of instruction, has become a major category of identity in North India. Many people describe themselves and others by invoking attendance at either a Hindi- or English-medium school. The first task of this article is to account for what Bakhtin callscentripetal forcesthat enable people at different positions in …
Liberalisation, privatisation, modernisation, and schooling in India: An interview with Krishna Kumar
In 2004, India’s Congress Party wrested control of parliament from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. I present below an interview conducted with Professor Krishna Kumar, Delhi University, the new Government’s choice for Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training. Professor Kumar discusses the ways that liberalisation, privatisation and modernisation complexly interact in late twentieth and early twenty‐first…
Witty House Name: Visual Expression, Interpretive Practice, and Uneven Agency in a Midwestern College Town
Many students living in a college town located in the Midwest of the United States have put up large signs on the houses in which they reside. The signs' messages such as "Hangover Here," "Crammed Inn," and "Syc-a-College" create puns drawing on multiple domains of meaning from student or local life, including locations, institutions, and popular film or music titles. This article considers the different meanings and purposes of house signs as en…
Of Nation and State: Language, School, and the Reproduction of Disparity in a North Indian City
Banaras, a city located in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, offers its residents many types of schools for pre-university education. This article argues that only some schools, those bifurcated by a distinction between ones that utilize Hindi and ones that utilize English, cater to those people who belong to what a large number of media venues and scholars call India's "new middle class." By using the growingly salient notion of language …
Decolonisation, globalisation: Language-in-education policy and practice. Angel M. Y. Lin and Peter W. Martin (eds) (2005)
Decolonisation, globalisation: Language-in-education policy and practice. Angel M. Y. Lin and Peter W. Martin (eds) (2005) Multilingual Matters xix+204pp. ISBN 1-85359-824-0
Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius by Patrick Eisenlohr
On mother and other tongues: Sociolinguistics, schools, and language ideology in northern India
Language Management/Labor
How language is conceptualized as labor is a function of the economy within which profits are made and businesses are structured. Under capitalist regimes, language practices have been conceptualized as apart from labor, as part of the means of production, and as the product. Under neoliberal regimes and conditions of globalization, and depending on the language worker's job description and status as managed or managing, ethnicity/race, gender, a…
Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation
Bakhtin's concept of addressivity affords an investigation of why my students and I were frustrated by the seeming lack of a connection between our participation in a self-tutorial in preparation for a digital literacy initiative, on the one hand, and the benefits of the acquisition of digital literacy, on the other hand. More than one structure of addressivity emerged from the tutorial, such that my students and I found the one that provided clu…
Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured World of a Literacy Welcome Center
The GED test has served as a mechanism for granting high school equivalency in the United States for decades, and some states have funded tutorial services because they have imagined the GED to be a means for getting a job or increasing one's wages. Based on field research conducted in literacy welcome centers in a small city in Upstate New York, we argue that teachers' and students' discursive reflections show that they attain agency in multiple…
Introduction: Language and schooling in India and Sri Lanka: Language medium matters
This article introduces a special issue of theInternational Journal of the Sociology of Languagefocused on the topic of language medium, pervasive in the nations comprising South Asia. This introduction provides a brief overview of sociolinguistic scholarship on education in India and Sri Lanka, a short sketch of the phenomenon of language-medium schooling, a review of the articles included in the special issue, and a summary of the theoretical c…
The gendered significance of the language-medium divide: Moments of Discursive Empowerment and Dis-Empowerment
Language medium and a high-stakes test: Language ideology and coaching centers in North India
The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) offers its set of examinations in a "medium", whether in a language recognized by the Constitution of India or in English. The notion of medium in the examination borrows from the notion of medium in schooling where it refers to the primary language of pedagogy. Although not all students who have studied in a particular medium in school and university go on to attempt the UPSC examinations in the same me…
Literacy
Literacy constitutes a domain of great interest in anthropology. A peculiarity of the interest in literacy in the discipline is the great importance of a single publication by Jack Goody and Ian Watt in 1963. Some scholars have engaged in overt critiques of the publication while others have provided examples of alternative methodological approaches and theoretical insights. Overt critiques often have been launched outside of anthropology such tha…
Language and Education
Anthropologists have found in language and education a relationship particularly important in the study of inequality and its reproduction. They have shown that interactional patterns in many communities, especially stigmatized and underserved ones, differ from those found in most classrooms. More recently, anthropologists have explored the intersection of language and education in contexts characterized by postcolonialism, indigeneity, minority …
Language, Script, and Advertising in India’s Hindi Belt: Institutional Voices in Flux
Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic ch…
Introduction: Sign and Script in South Asia
This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. R…
Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India
A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities. The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India. Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and the…
South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media
Scholars such as Murray Emeneau and John Gumperz made India prominent in the development of sociolinguistics as a field of study through their simultaneous attention to difference and cohesiveness. Later, scholars stressed the ideological mediation of practice, especially the importance of colonial constructions that continue to be relevant in the postcolonial period. Work on specific notions such as mother tongue and medium of instruction, and t…
Sociology (22 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Law (12 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Ideology (7 works)