Discourses of Exclusion: Immigrant-Origin Youth Responses to Immigration Debates in an Election Year

Political discourse on immigration policy often provides a window into a society’s boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Here, we seek to understand how those in liminal positions respond to political debates that raise issues of boundary maintenance. Drawing from Bakhtinian concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses as well as Gramsci’s concept of common sense, we analyzed how a superdiverse sample of 26 immigrant-origin adolescents (from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe) responded to video segments of presidential debates from the 2012 U.S. election. Youth’s responses to presidential video clips about undocumented immigration policies fell along a spectrum from inclusionary to exclusionary, with many voicing mixed responses to immigration policies. Half of the youth referenced their own family’s migration experience when discussing immigration policy, most frequently in empathetic ways; however, this did not preclude them from aligning with discourses of exclusion. The theme of fairness was prevalent in their responses, yet it emerged in distinct ways. This work highlights the need to interrogate common-sense discourses of exclusion.     

Using Television as an Educational Medium

Abstract

The fact that each medium has its own profile of cognitive advantages calls on the media educationist to master the medium's formal features so as to use them to convey an educational message that is desirable and suitable for the medium. TV is known to be a pervasive audiovisual electronic mass medium. This paper pursues its features in order to expose its particular qualities that have the potential to enhance education. Only if TV has more to offer educationally than other educational tools have, or if it makes a specific contribution to education, can its expensive use be justified.     

Managing Architectural Records in the House that Rubber Built: A Case Study in Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration in Museum Archives

Managing architectural records presents a number of challenges, especially in museums and historic sites where a number of disciplines tend to converge. This case study will chronicle the architectural drawings project at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens in Akron, Ohio that occurred in two phases over a fifteen-year period. It will present the situations that arose and the multi-disciplinary approaches devised to solve them. It also will illustrate how collaboration across several inherently different yet related professions—including archivists, objects curators, and restoration architects—produced the best outcome and how others can apply these methods to address similar projects.