Knowing silence

Mangual Figueroa's Knowing Silence is a sobering book in an era of hostility and heightened inflammatory political rhetoric against immigrant communities.As the prevalence of dangerous political speech rises, it also spreads across various sectors of public life, including public education.In this context, Knowing Silence is a powerful book because it shows how the impact of immigration policy and discourse is anything but esoteric or neutral, and effects immigrant communities deeply, including with tremendous impact among its young.Mangual Figueroa's investigation on what students in "middle childhood" (ages 6-12) know about immigration, and how they discuss it among themselves and with the adults in their lives, will be of interest to researchers, educators and activist seeking to better understand what children think and say about immigration status, as well as to those who wish to use that understanding to better support the learning, growth and academic advancement of students from diverse and mixed-status families.Building upon Mangual Figueroa's impressive oeuvre of ethnographic research focused on the intersection of education and immigration, Knowing Silence is thoughtfully written and is executed with a great deal of care for the young and vulnerable people who are at the heart of the ethnographic study at the core of the book.Drawing from over two hundred hours of recorded talk captured over a two-year period, the author follows six young girls as they transition from elementary school to middle school and catalogs instances where their lives are shaped by issues related to immigration status across a variety of settings, including at school, at home, on field trips and while walking in the street.Page after page, Knowing Silence achieves what it sets out to do, it shares with the reader the deep understanding young children carry about immigration and the wide range of strategies they use when deciding who to share that information with, and when.In doing so, Knowing Silence reveals a difficult truth, that young children really do know quite a lot about immigration and their knowing makes it difficult to characterize them as "innocent" and free from the troubling effects of a repressive immigration apparatus.For these youngsters, immigration complicates their lives and the lives of their loved ones, and they are aware of it.Additionally, the structure of the book makes the main thematic elements easy to follow and strengthens its argumentative push, as well.The best example of this is Mangual Figueroa's decision to frame the study in the context of Plyler v. Doe, a landmark Supreme Court case barring states from denying access to public education based on the citizenship status of students.A key legacy of the case is its barring of schools from gathering

Aesthetics · Art · Developmental psychology · Immigration · Political science · Silence · Sociology · Education and experiences of immigrants and refugees · Law · Psychology

• Experts in Their Own Lives

  Open Access•Wraychel Gilmore•Journal of Childhood Studies•2024

  Add to list