Immersion, Immigration, Immutability: Regimes of Learning and Politics of Labeling in Study Abroad

Abstract

This article investigates how the use of the term immersion to describe one's experience abroad performatively interpellates individuals and reproduces power relations. A collaboration between an anthropologist (Doerr) and a study-abroad student (Suarez), it analyzes the student's interpretation of three types of experience he had in Spain: staying with his uncle, an immigrant from Colombia (his first month), studying abroad (his second month), and backpacking (his third month). Suarez described the experience of his second and third months, but not the first, as immersion. Drawing on Louis Althusser and Judith Butler, we argue that his calling a particular experience immersion (or not) defined the meaning of the act and settings, performatively interpellated people involved, and suggested the nature of Suarez's relationship to them. Also, comparing it with his interpretation of his immigrant parents' experience of assimilation in the United States, we analyze how these naming acts reproduce what we call regimes of learning that hierarchize learning experiences by the learners' background and contexts, and show the ways the game of immutability perpetuates relations of power through the performative use of apparently neutral yet loaded terms; we suggest how to avoid this.