by Jamie A. Thomas

I'm picking up the blog this month with a post that highlights how the way our bodies are read--in coordination with the languages we speak--can make for very different intersections with race and gender. How many of us think about language learning when we consider the combined impacts of racialization and gendering? How many study abroad coordinators are aware of intersectional challenges for their students of color?

Why do we forget to consider language as another dimension of our social experience? Because we take it for granted. Language is such a regularly embedded and embodied aspect of our everyday experience, we sometimes are unaware of how it can contextually shift in its use to construct ideals of woman, nation, or Arabic-speaker, for example.

The video posted below on "Study Abroad in Jordan" is my latest installment of the #LanguageStory video series, and follows two college students, Laye and Erica, in their sojourn to Amman, Jordan. I met each of them during my time as an ethnographer embedded in Jordan, and their friendship is all the more powerful considering their many differences: Laye is a first-generation Muslim immigrant to the U.S., and Erica is a White American woman with aspirations for a career in Dubai. 

It's a bit paradoxical, but the notion of language is quite often missing from discussion of how socially (and culturally) constructed categories of identity can impact our experiences. In many ways, words said and unsaid can contribute to discrimination, exclusion, and a narrowing of possibilities.  What I mean here, is that even though racialization and gendering are largely accomplished through discourse and communication, we fail to pay attention to language as a medium of exclusion, or as yet another dimension of reading a person as Other.  

​Both Erica and Laye enjoy their life abroad in Amman, Jordan, and view it as an extraordinary opportunity. Their friendship has fostered a unique brand of colloquial Arabic between them. However, as it turns out, their study abroad experiences diverge in ways that relate to how their bodies are gendered and raced by others in Amman. Across each of their experiences, language remains another dimension through which they experience difference. 

For Erica, being seen as a woman narrows her opportunities to converse with men. In her homestay situation, this also leads to marriage as the central topic of conversation. This has the effect of narrowing her potential

There's so much to be learned from listening to the voices of others. This past semester and summer, I was fortunate enough to have been part of an interdisciplinary team that prepared 17 undergraduate students for field research in Cuba. For nearly all of us, this was our first time to the island. For some of us, this was our first experience on an airplane, or outside of the U.S. Together, we represented studies in anthropology, Black Studies, linguistics, cultural studies, economics, environmental studies, Spanish, sociology, and visual and performance arts. ​This was a tremendous experience in intercultural learning and bilingual communication. 

All throughout our 10-day research and study trip, I conducted intermittent video interviews with students, my teaching partners at Swarthmore College--a team of faculty and administrative leadership. I created this video to chronicle our individual and connected reflections on multiple dimensions of our field experiences.

Biggest of all, this was our students' first experience speaking with Cuban people in Cuba about the enduring importance of the Cuban Revolution, the history of African enslavement in the Caribbean, the transformation of economic, education, and medical sectors, and the continuing traditions of African religion, dance, philosophy, and values across the island nation.

By speaking with Cuban professionals, mothers, doctors, museum directors, proprietors, artists, community activists, and makers of all kinds, students learned how to formulate meaningful and localized questions, connect with speakers of Cuban Spanish, and challenge their own assumptions about what is universally important to cultures other than their own. 

Our trip was generously sponsored through support from several partner organizations and departments across the College, and we are grateful!

by Jamie A. Thomas

Though many of us feel there's something deeply wrong about denying opportunities to girls and women, we are okay with demanding that women be judged by their femininity, hairstyles, and nail polish, or lack thereof. Even though we acknowledge that it takes the involvement of men, along with women, to stop sexism, how many of us readily understand that the burden of dismantling racist thinking and practice lies not primarily with marginalized groups?

Just two days after the presidential election result, and students in my regularly scheduled classes seemed lifeless and downtrodden, defeated and deflated. They had no questions, no thoughts for discussion, because their world had let them down. Somehow they had thought one vote would do it all, but I told them that it was never just about this election.

The dog whistles coming from Clinton's opponent (and his tacit supporters) were sounding the very racialization, sexist anxiety, and empowered prejudice that has festered in the U.S. since before its founding. It's a fundamentalist voice that hides behind economic anxiety and patriotism, while minoritizing, marginalizing, and dehumanizing many of the very people who seek to make this union more perfect. Hate speech and its accompanying mob violence, vigilante aggression, structural injustices, and covert, normalized language of biological inferiority have never been fully denounced in this country, and that is the true shame of this moment. 

Anyone clambering to declare "I am not a racist", has likely been unwilling to examine their participation in and benefit from structural inequity. For those of us who think we couldn't possibly be racist, sexist, ableist, class-ist, or otherwise, how do we treat people who (don't) look or sound like us? How much are our lowered expectations, dismissals, fears, and misunderstandings communicated in words like minority, wife, gay, ugly, unattractive, ghetto, poor, weak, foreign? What behaviors do we need to change, along with our language? How can we encourage each other to change?

My students looked so dejected, some close to tears. But this wasn't the time to tap out, I insisted. Now, more than ever, we needed to learn from this election, and from each other. We need to listen, reach out, and work together for social and structural change. And with that, I began preparing us for a visit to Serenity House, a community house and support center in North Philadelphia, where we would have a conversation with community partners about neighborhood activism and identity. 

Today, I'm writing to you from somewhere in Mexico, where I'm spending the summer doing field research and writing. Over the course of my extended visits to this country since 2010, my Spanish has enormously improved. This means my interviewing has gotten more effective because I'm better able to listen in detail.

​But there are many ways of speaking Spanish--any language, really--and among these, is the stylish use of slang, and colorful incorporation of taboo terms like swear words, profanity, and dirty words. Believe it or not, words such as these pop up in interview situations, and other contexts of field observation and participation. Sometimes it becomes my task to swear right along with my participants, or at least empathize with their animated excitement or frustration.

Speech communities are constantly innovating new turns of phrase, and American English is no exception. Can you imagine if you didn't know the loaded meanings of the now ubiquitous "balls" or "surfboard"? (Haha, you'll have to go urban dictionary for more information, I'm afraid that would be too much of a digression to explain here.)

In this blog post, I describe a recent episode in which I appropriately used some dirty slang here in Mexico, and how this led to a unique opportunity for intercultural learning. I also share a new list of dirty words I learned just last week in Oaxaca City, with a discussion of why I think these colorful words should be more purposefully included on your own list of survival vocabulary. 

By Jamie A. Thomas

Where do you go when you want to explore at your own pace? When you want to learn with visual interest and engaged focus? You might end up at a museum. A place where objects, stories, and experiences are narrated through artful display and carefully crafted prose.

In Swahili, the word for museum is makumbusho, meaning a physical place of memories, related to kumbuka (remember) and kumbukumbu (memories). I like these Swahili terms because they capture the role of museums in archiving public discourse and stimulating our cultural understanding of our relationship to human events, created things, and natural phenomena. The Guardian recently had a wonderful piece on how a temporary outdoor art museum in a marginalized Mumbai community is challenging mainstream ideas of what counts as art. The Mumbai museum features the avant-garde pottery and intricate tools of local craftspeople, many of whom have never set foot in a museum space. The key revelation? "When you have a museum, you count."

Particularly because I'm chasing my own growing interest in museums, I recently set out to explore a bit of Old Sacramento on a visit with family. What I discovered enchanted me further with museum exhibits as forms of public discourse, and has me thinking about ways more of us can enjoy these spaces. And even though the power went out in one museum, this didn't spell the end of my memorable encounter.

As digital spaces become more ubiquitous, I'm finding it increasingly important to temporarily unplug and make time for physical visits to material collections. So now, I want to share with you some of the insights I gathered on visits to a variety of public history and art museums across Sacramento and Los Angeles. During my spring break from teaching, I experienced firsthand how tactile engagement, play, and ambient inspiration amplified my intercultural learning. Essentially, I found myself noticing and discovering new information during moments of wonder [and wander ] with museum collections. These are curative and educational approaches I now aim to incorporate into my own practice...