VEST Education and Research Speaker Series: Nelson Flores

In this presentation, Dr. Nelson Flores will conduct a raciolinguistic genealogy of himself as a point of entry for theorizing the role of race in the postcolonial world. He will begin by situating his family history within colonial relationships that led to his parent’s displacement from Latin America to the US, where they found themselves racialized because of their use of Spanish, and the impact of this on his raciolinguistic socialization. He will then situate his professional trajectory into bilingual education within the legacy of the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) passed in the US in 1968. He will connect the BEA to broader global reconfiguration of race that recruited a cadre of postcolonial elites into reliance on deficit ideologies as part of their advocacy for their communities. He will position himself as an inheritor of this legacy and examine the ways that he has navigated it as an ESL teacher in US public schools as well as a bilingual education researcher at an elite US university.

Speaker Bio

Nelson Flores is an associate professor in educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the intersection of language, race, and the political economy in shaping U.S. educational policies and practices. He has been the recipient of many academic awards including a 2017 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, the 2019 James Alatis Prize for Research on Language Planning and Policy in Educational Contexts and the2022 AERA Early Career Award.