Language And Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics Of Belonging

This revealing analysis of everyday language use among Moroccan immigrant children in Spain explores their cultural and linguistic life-worlds as they develop a hybrid, yet coherent, sense of identity in their multilingual communities. The author shows how they adapt to the local ambivalence toward Muslim culture and increased surveillance by Spanish authorities. Offers ground-breaking research from linguistic anthropology charting the politics of childhood in Muslim immigrant communities in SpainIlluminates the contemporary debates concerning assimilation and alienation in Europe's immigrant Muslim and North African populationsProvides an integrated blend of theory and empirical ethnographic dataEnriches recent research on immigrant children with analyses of their sense of belonging, communicative practices, and emerging processes of identification

Inmaculada M^a Garcia-Sanchez is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, where her research focuses on language and the immigrant experience; language and culture in educational contexts; language and racialization; and language socialization in immigrant communities. Her work on immigrant children has been published in journals such as Linguistics and Education, Pragmatics, and Multicultural Perspectives, and she contributed to The Handbook of Language Socialization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Garcia-Sanchez has received numerous awards for her work, and in 2012 was granted a postdoctoral fellowship co-funded by the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation.