Decolonizing Study Abroad through the Identities of Latinx Students: A Manifesto to Reclaim Identities and Heritage

This book counters the common understanding of study abroad in Latin America as a White and middle-class colonizer practice and re-imagines it to fit the needs of Latinx immigrant/transnational higher education students.

The book centers Latinx youth inhabiting familial heritage spaces as a pathway toward a deeper understanding of themselves as racialized and colonized individuals, reframing study abroad for Latinx youth as a way for them to reclaim, negotiate, and strengthen their own immigrant/Latino/a/Chicano/a and other identities. The text is undergirded by a theoretical argument based on decolonial methods in education and Critical Race Theory and draws on counter-stories, rich descriptive interviews, and participant observations across 26 years of combined experience leading educational trips to Latin America. The authors analyse, reflect, and critique the field of study abroad to advocate for the rethinking of recruitment strategies, pedagogical experiences, language practices, and community partnerships that include Latino/a, Chicano/a, and Latin American immigrant youth and their families from the beginning. They present a new conceptualization of Latinx immigrant students studying abroad as engaging opportunities for reclaiming heritage, culture, histories, and language, for exploring a sense of identity and obligation to Latin communities, and for healing from the effects on Whiteness and ethnocentrism in ways online possible outside the continental United States. As such, the book shifts the gaze of the entire field toward new diversities showcasing examples of how educational trips abroad can be re-envisioned to suit the needs of ethnically minoritized students in the United States.

This volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, educators, and education officers working across higher education and international education, looking for contemporary, global. and forward-thinking decolonial methodologies.

G. Sue Kasun is Professor of Language Education at the College of Education and Human Development, Georgia State University, USA.

Beth Marks is a faculty member in the Secondary and Middle Grades Education Department at Kennesaw State University, USA.

Julián Jefferies is Associate Professor at California State University, Fullerton, USA.