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"Those Asian Kids": Race/Ethnicity, Invisibility and Absence in an Australian Classroom

chapter
posted on 2019-01-01, 00:00 authored by Emma CharltonEmma Charlton
This chapter discusses a class of students at a middle school in Queensland, Australia. For some of these students, their race/ethnicity was named, and for others, it was not. This absence of naming saw hegemonic notions of Australian student identity at this school dominate: the students who were from parts of East Asia were named as “Asian”, while the rest were unnamed. In addition to an absence of race/ethnicity for the mainly White Anglo-Australian students in majority at this school, the naming of some students as ‘Asian’ rendered them in some ways visible, while also largely invisible as individuals in the class. Furthermore, there was an absence of options in these students’ classroom subjectivities. Using data from a mixed-method ethnographic year-long study, this chapter considers this space of the classroom, and the constrictions for how these young people could be as learners and individuals as a result of the construction of these students as racialised/ethnicised. It is simultaneously an unsettling observation and an attempt at unsettling the space/place of an Australian classroom.

History

Pagination

285-298

ISBN-13

9789811367298

Language

eng

Publication classification

B1 Book chapter

Copyright notice

2019, Springer Nature Singapore

Editor/Contributor(s)

Pinto S, Hannigan S, Walker-Gibbs B, Charlton E

Publisher

Springer

Place of publication

Singapore

Title of book

Interdisciplinary unsettlings of place and space: Conversations, investigations and research