Book Description

This year-long instrumental multiple case study examined how four participants, from South Korea, People's Republic of China, and France, conceptualized the notion of race as newly arrived international graduate students and English language learners in the United States. The participants were graduate students who majored in areas not related to language studies at Utopia University, a predominantly White institution of higher education located in the Midwestern part of the United States. In this dissertation, I illustrate how my participants came to experience race in the U.S. as newcomers from abroad through exploring their lives in and outside of the university in their first year in residence. Drawing on Feagin's (2000) systemic racism and white racial frame (2006), and Lave and Wenger's (1991) communities of practice, I examine their socialization into new communities of practice, and the role of race in those processes. Findings showed that racialized Asian newcomers were not apprenticed to White-dominant communities of practice. However, the one white, non-Asian participant was able to gain membership into mainstream communities on and off campus partly because she was racialized as White. Racialized Asian newcomers struggled to start somewhere as peripheral participants in new communities of practice, but membership was often denied or marginalized. This study sheds light on the racialized participants' attempt to find safe spaces where they were able to form some level of friendship, and gain some level of acceptance, with English-speaking interlocutors. Although the study describes their difficulties in doing so, the racialized Asian participants were ultimately able to find safe spaces in their new environments. In this dissertation, I critically examined the theoretical framework of second language socialization used in applied linguistics and showed that second language socialization is possible only after racialized Asian participants could find safe spaces, in which they found possibilities for authentic socialization with English-speaking community members. In such spaces, White gatekeepers were found to play pivotal roles in creating and providing safe spaces. These findings suggest that there needs to be a restructuring of university campuses and a more equitable distribution of rights and responsibilities for newcomers in U.S. campuses.