James Collins

Office: Arts & Sciences Building, Room 242
Ph: (518) 442-4708
E-mail: collins@albany.edu

Ph.D., UC-Berkeley, 1983

Interests: Linguistics, social theory, Athabaskan studies, education studies
Areas: North America

Chair, Anthropology Department

Jointly appointed in the Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science and the Department of Reading.

Curriculum Vitae

Course Syllabi

Anthropology 424/524: Language and Culture

Research Statement

I am an anthropologist and linguist by training. For over twenty years, I have studied issues of language diversity, ethnic identity, and the politics of literacy. Some of this has been done in Native American communities in Northern California, and this is reported in my book Understanding Tolowa Histories (Routledge 1998) and in Literacy and Literacies (Cambridge University Press 2003). Much of my research, however, has taken the form of ethnographic and sociolinguistic studies of schools and communities in urban settings in the U.S.: Berkeley, Chicago, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Albany, New York. This is reported in various venues, to be collected in the forthcoming Contextualizing language, identity, and inequality (St. Jerome Publishers). Most recently, I have begun research on of the social conditions of multilingualism in an era of globalization, working with colleagues in Belgium on migration and language contact and on migration and language learning in Upstate New York. My main theoretical commitments lie in engaging discourse analysis with debates in social theory. My work tends to combine fine-grained analysis of linguistic practices with ethnographic research oriented to current theoretical debates about power and identity. I regularly teach courses on linguistics, language and society, and discourse analysis as well as more specialized methodological and topical offerings.

Research of James Collins

Working Papers on Language, Power, & Identity

No.18
No.21

Select Publications Since 2000

Books

2003
Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, "Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language" Series.

Special Issues of Journals (Editor & Co-Editor)

2005
Multilingualism and Diasporic Populations: Spatializing Practices, Institutional Processes, and Social Hierarchies. Language & Communication (vol 25) (Co-edited with Stef Slembrouck)

2003
Ethnography, Discourse, and Hegemony. Pragmatics 13.1 (March) (Co-edited with Jan Blommaert, Monica Heller, Ben Rampton, Stef Slembrouck, and Jef Verschueren)

2001
Discourse and Critique. Critique of Anthropology 21.1 (Winter) (Co-edited with Jan Blommaert, Monica Heller, Ben Rampton, Stef Slembrouck, and Jef Verschueren)

Articles and Book Chapters

2004
Language. In A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians. Thomas Biolsi (ed). Pp. 490-505. Oxford: Blackwell.

Foreword. In An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Rebecca Rogers (ed). Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.

2003
Reclaiming tradition, remaking community. In Language and Social Identity. Richard Blot (ed). Pp.225-242. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.

The reading wars in situ. Ethnography, Discourse, and Hegemony. Special issue of Pragmatics. 13(1): 85-100.

Collins, Blommaert, et al. Introduction. Ethnography, Discourse, and Hegemony. Special issue of Pragmatics. 13(1): 1-10.

2002
Language, identity, and learning in the era of “expert-guided systems.” In Linguistic Anthropology of Education. Stanton Wortham & Betsy Rymes (eds). Pp. 31-60. Westport, CT: Praeger.

2001
Selling the market: Educational standards, discourse, and social inequality. Discourse and Critique. Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 21(2): 143-163.

Jan Blommaert, James Collins, Monica Heller, Ben Rampton, Stef Slembrouck, & Jef Verschueren. Introduction. Discourse and Critique. Special issue on Critique of Anthropology 21(1): 5-12.

2000
Bernstein, Bourdieu, and the new literacy studies. Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Identity: Themes from the Work of Basil Bernstein. Special issue of Linguistics & Education 11(3): 65-78.