Molly Hamm-Rodríguez

MOLLY HAMM-RODRIGUEZ, then a graduate student at University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Imperial Formations of Tourism and Youth Futures: A Raciolinguistic Perspective on Language and Literacy in the Dominican Republic,” supervised by Dr. Meleidis Gort. Using a raciolinguistic perspective, this project interrogates the ideological work behind how youth futures in the Dominican Republic (e.g., education, employment) become the topic of problematization and how youth language and literacy practices become the target for intervention. Black Dominican and Haitian youth living in situations of economic precarity are often framed as at-risk and subjected to ‘coercive concern’ by institutions that mark them as possible subjects of empowerment or ‘unworthy subjects of care.’. Building on a decade of professional and personal experience in the Dominican Republic, the grantee conducted twelve months of fieldwork using sociolinguistic, ethnographic, and participatory action research methods with youth to examine how the capitalist and imperial formations of tourism shape struggles for survival in the Caribbean. Building on the anthropological literatures of raciolinguistic ideologies, political economy, and youth language and literacy, this study explores the interpersonal and institutional implications of problematizations related to youth employment and attends to the workings of alternative spaces of resistance that youth forge in everyday life beyond the confines of racial capitalism.