Racially Hegemonic Articulations: Class as Race in Constructions of Dominance in an Undergraduate Architecture Studio

Abstract

This article responds to recent debates in this journal surrounding raciolinguistics and potential pitfalls of siloing of race and reproducing essentialism in the scholarship of language and race. Using Stuart Hall's theory of articulation, it provides an anti-essentialist linguistic ethnographic analysis of identity construction in a UK educational setting that centres the racialised social formation by locating these constructions in specific histories and material conditions. Through a focus on colonial logics and treatment of race and class as co-constitutive axes of social differentiation, the analysis takes a raciolinguistic perspective and illustrates the utility of Hall's articulation for managing the tensions between anti-essentialism and accounting for structural injustice and oppression.