‘I don’t want to be pushed into an islamic school’: biography and raciolinguistic ideologies in education

Abstract

This article argues for the significance of biographical theory in research on raciolinguistic ideologies in education. It accounts for biographies as a basis for the study of the ways in which students conceive the languages, social spaces and power relations which shape processes of inclusion and exclusion. Taking anti-Muslim discourses in Austria as a point of departure, this article introduces raciolinguistics as a way to theorize the co-naturalization of language and race in education. It then delineates the use of biographies to contextualize understandings of the significance of language across the life course. In the empirical part, I analyze the biographical narration of a university student who wears a headscarf. I focus on her experiences with the specific relationship between anti-Muslim racism and language in different stages of her life. The final part of the article discusses how biographical research can contribute to a broader understanding of raciolinguistic power relations in education.