Workshop Leader: Marjorie Orellana, PhD

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana is Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information  Studies at UCLA. She served as Associate Director of the Center for the Study of International  Migration from 2015 through 2021, and will serve as theAssociateVice Provost of the  International Institute beginning in January, 2022. Her research centers on the experiences of immigrant youth in urban schools and communities, including as language and cultural brokers for  their families. She is the author of Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth and Cultures (Rutgers  

University Press, 2009), Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love (Routledge, 2016),  Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart, and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2020), and a co-edited  volume (with Inmaculada García-Sánchez): Language and Cultural Processes in Communities and Schools: Bridging  Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups (Routledge, 2019). She has also published in an interdisciplinary  array of journals including American Anthropologist, Harvard Educational Review, Social Problems, Anthropology and  Education Quarterly, Reading Research Quarterly, and Linguistics in Education. She was recently selected as a Fellow of  the American Educational Research Association in 2021, and is a past president of the Council of Anthropology  and Education. She was a bilingual classroom teacher in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1993.

We are living in a time of tremendous uncertainty, making it difficult to plan for the future, including for research.  In this workshop, we will draw inspiration from immigrant families as we design flexible and adaptable approaches  to life and for research proposals. We will share and discuss ways of doing “ethnographically-oriented” research  even when full participant observation in field sites is not possible. Following approaches laid out in Mindful  Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Orellana, 2020), we will practice “mindful”  or contemplative approaches to coping with uncertainty, expanding our ways of seeing, and more fully exploring  “emic” perspectives in research with im/migrant families. The workshop aims to support participants in  connecting scholarly work with social commitments in the service of socially-transformative research on  migration issues.