One of the ways in which schools have tried to accommodate the increasing heterogeneity of student bodies is to implement programs that are designed to foster inclusion through the overt socialization of values such as tolerance. In this talk, “Intolerabilities of Tolerance-Making: The Political and Moral Economy of ‘Tolerance’ in Ethnically Diverse Schools”, Garcia-Sanchez examines the interface between the political and moral economy of the school and that of the larger society, focusing on the paradoxes that arise when contested sociopolitical values are explicitly taught in schools. More specifically, she examines the implementation of one such program in a diverse elementary school in Spain with a high concentration of Moroccan immigrant students. Drawing on her ethnography and on larger European discourses surrounding immigration, Garcia-Sanchez discusses the contradictory meanings/uses of tolerance.

Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez specializes in linguistic anthropology, and her research focuses on the immigrant experience children and youth growing up in multilingual and multicultural societies. She is a past postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Education, and the author of Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging. Some of her other publications on immigrant childhoods include articles in Linguistics and Education, Language and Communication, Pragmatics, The Handbook of Language Socialization, and Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race.