Draft:Marcia Farr

Marcia Elizabeth Farr (born 1944) is an American sociolinguist and ethnographer; she is an Emerita Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as an Emerita Professor of Education and English at the Ohio State University.

Biography

Marcia Farr was born in Berkeley, California on March 25, 1944. Relocating to Ohio, she attended Upper Arlington schools, graduating from its high school in 1961, and from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1965 with a BA in English. She then moved to the Washington DC area and taught high school English, and subsequently received an MA in Linguistics from American University. Farr continued her education, receiving a PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 1976, partially supported by National Science Foundation fellowships. That year she started working at the National Institute of Education, directing its program on writing research. In 1982 Farr joined the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where she remained for twenty years, retiring as an emerita professor. During that period she founded and edited two academic book series: Writing Research (Ablex Publishing), 1982-92, and Written Language (Hampton Press, 1992-2000). She then taught at the Ohio State University for another ten years, retiring as an emerita professor from that institution as well, in 2012.

Work

As a sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, Farr studies oral and written language use in social and cultural context, as well as how these various local ways of using language and literacy affect the teaching and learning of academic literacy. Her research has been funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as by the US Census Bureau. In the early 1990s Farr began a long-term ethnographic study of language and culture among a transnational social network of Mexican families in Chicago and in their village-of-origin in Michoacán, Mexico (Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Mexican Community, University of Texas Press, 2006). A pair of edited books Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City's Neighborhoods, Erlbaum, 2004, and Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago, Erlbaum, 2005) explore language and/or literacy practices in a variety of Chicago communities, including African American, African, Lithuanian, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, "White" working and middle class, Swedish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican. A third edited book (with Lisya Seloni and Juyoung Song), Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Education: Language, Literacy, and Culture (Routledge, 2010), explores the implications of ethnolinguistic diversity for education.

Legacy

Most of Farr’s two dozen PhD students followed her into academia. They are (or were) on the faculties of: Central Missouri University; the College of New Jersey; Columbia College, Chicago; DePaul University, Chicago; Drexel University, Philadelphia; Eastern Illinois University; Florida State University; Illinois State University; Michigan State University; Murray State University, Kentucky; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; Ohio State University; University of Arkansas; University of California at Berkeley; University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Massachusetts, Boston; University of Texas, San Antonio; University of Washington, Seattle; Utica College of Syracuse University; and Wright State University, Ohio. In other words, she has influenced a generation of students throughout the country. Specifically:

    David Bwire: Like many who have been advised by Marcia Farr, I continue to take up, apply, and extend her approaches to research on language and cultural diversity. We have used it to illustrate how understanding plurilingualism in a non-western space extends contributions on research on language use by underrepresented contexts of inquiry. Farr’s guidance and vision provide a stable scholarly foundation on which I base my work on transcultural literacy practices.

    Martha Sidury Christiansen: My early work on social media centered on the second and third generations of the network Marcia focused on. It emanated from her larger ethnographic study of transnationals, and my work merges the traditional ethnographic approach I learned under her with more current online ethnographic ones. By merging these ways to do ethnography  my work has been able to expand the notion of what it means to be Mexican in the US explored by Marcia within the first generation and of how to “do" transnationalism in online social spaces. Following Marcia’s steps, I studied how the second and third generation co-constructed identities using language ideologies that first generation held (as seen in Marcia’s studies), including the ideologies around the use of vernacular varieties of Spanish   Marcia was one of the early scholars to espouse the fields of sociolinguistics and writing, especially academic writing. Thus, my work further expands this notion in looking how orality influences the writing of transnationals online. Marcia’s involvement with the transnational network made it possible for me to continue her work with the younger generations. Her guidance and support helped me build a strong foundation to do work in linguistic anthropology and education.

    Jennifer Cohen: Marcia motivated me to pursue ethnographic research with her curiosity and compassion toward the family network she studied. I watched Marcia stick with her project for years, returning again and again to the questions of how the people she knew made sense of themselves and their lives, and how their individual stories made an impact on global social and economic dynamics. To this day, I respect the persistence it takes for a researcher to reaching deep, meaningful understanding and communicate her insights to help others do more. Marcia's support in applying for the Spencer Foundation's Dissertation Fellowship was instrumental in my success. With that Fellowship, I was able to complete my dissertation and go on to a wonderful career at DePaul University.

 E. Dominguez Barajas (Department of English, University of Arkansas): "Marcia Farr’s scholarship not only made exciting contributions to the fields of literacy studies, ethnolinguistics, and the ethnography of communication, but she personally introduced a considerable number of graduate students to these fields while she was a member of the English Department faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago. I, like several of my peers pursuing a graduate degree in English at that time and place, thought the scholarly specializations within that discipline were limited to literary studies or creative writing before being introduced to the study of “language in [everyday] use.” My graduate studies trajectory, and indeed my professional life, was forever changed by Farr’s courses and mentorship. With a shared scholarly perspective and friendship that continues to this day, our work seeks to reveals how social and cultural factors influence language use and how that has direct effects on everything from individual identity formation to the establishment of far-reaching social policies. The guidance and vision Farr provided set me on my path to becoming a paremiologist, a professional identity that was cemented with the publication of my book in that field of studies: The Function of Proverbs in Discourse (2010)."

    Juan Guerra: Marcia introduced members of my graduate student cohort and me to ethnography, a research methodology I did not know anything about at the time and which I have since adopted as a primary lens for witnessing the world around me. She and her co-principal investigator, Lucía Elías-Olivares, also selected me as one of their first research assistants for a long-term ethnographic study of language and culture among a group of Mexican immigrant families in Chicago. Finally, Marcia and I co-authored two essays together: “Literacy in the Community: A Study of Mexicano Families in Chicago” (1995) and “Writing on the Margins: The Spiritual and Autobiographical Discourse of Two Mexicanas in Chicago” (2002). These multiple experiences helped me establish a strong foundation that has informed the scholarship I have produced over the last 28 years as a tenure-track professor at the University of Washington at Seattle.

    Julie Lindquist: Marcia gave me the greatest gift of all at a moment when I needed it most: permission to trust my experiences and to value my knowledge.  She helped me to see that even I, who felt so much at a remove from the community I was seeking to join, had something to contribute.

    Daiva Markelis: Marcia’s academic work on the oral and literacy practices of immigrants from Mexico forever influenced the way I view the intersections between language and culture. She encouraged me to explore the literacy acquisition of Lithuanian immigrants, which led to my dissertation. My years in graduate school working on my PhD with Marcia as my director were among the most interesting and rewarding of my life. I now work at a job I love as a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University and utilize aspects of ethnography in my creative nonfiction writing.

    Jabari Mahiri: Marcia was the intellectual bridge for my movement from the Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric program in UIC's English Department to the Language, Literacy, and Culture program in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education where I have been a professor for the past 25 years. Importantly, she grounded me in sociolinguistic and ethnographic perspectives that have been core to my writing and research during this quarter century.

    Beverly Moss: Marcia introduced me to Literacy Studies as a field, to ethnography, and taught me how to be a scholar.  More importantly, she showed confidence in me as a scholar.  My first major scholarly project, beyond the dissertation, was an edited collection, Literacy Across Communities, that Marcia published in her series.  Her decision to do so, went a long way in establishing me as a scholar in Literacy Studies.

    Gloria Nardini: When I met Marcia in Grad School at UIC, I was already too old to be doing what I was doing, but she (and my late husband Francesco) were my greatest encouragers. He famously said, “Who cares?” when I expressed trepidation about being over the hill. And she helped me clarify my ideas about language and culture that led to the publishing of Che Bella Figura: the Power of Performance in an Italian Ladies’ Club in Chicago. I shall always be grateful to both of them!

    Rachel Reynolds: Marcia Farr enlivened my ability to connect literacy in everyday life to the challenges of creating meaningful human development opportunities in our society.  In particular, she taught me to ask what is the lived experience(s) of literacy and how is it meaningful in form and substance in our homes, in our relationships, in our own sense of self, and in our ability to exercise power through written and oral communication with constituencies like the church, the school, the workplace, and the wider social milieu.  I've applied these questions to understanding African students' life achievements as a function of literacy and their beliefs about what literacy can and should do in their lives.  On a personal note, as a teacher, Marcia Farr taught me to dive confidently "down into the data" and learn to think at multiple levels about discourse in use; that's NOT EASY to teach and not easy to do, and Marcia was profoundly good at it, as you can see with two generations of sociolinguists under her training.

    Lisya Seloni: Marcia is an amazing human being!  I had the honor of working as her graduate assistant while I was finishing up my dissertation at Ohio State University in 2008. During this time, she generously mentored me including me in major academic activities such as co-teaching a class, organizing an academic conference and editing my very first book. I remember how at ease she always made me feel and how much I learned from her regarding what it means to be a strong academic woman. As a first generation college student who is also an accidental immigrant in the U.S., her confidence in me meant so much. Even though our paths have not crossed since then, she has been an inspiration to me. I carry her high sense of ethics in research and deep commitment to language studies in my everyday academic life today.

    Juyoung Song: Marcia showed me how to be a researcher with passion, and my interest in language ideology and identity was formed and developed by interacting with her. She also taught me how to become a teacher who can wait and listen to students’ stories and treat students as future colleagues.

Selected Publications

Whiteman, M. F. (ed.). 1980. Vernacular Black English and education: Reactions to Ann Arbor. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Whiteman, M. F. (ed.). 1981. Variation in writing: Functional and linguistic cultural differences. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Farr, M. (ed.). 1985. Advances in writing research: Children's early writing development. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Farr, M. 1994. Biliteracy in the home: Practices among mexicano families in Chicago, in D. Spener (ed.), Adult biliteracy in the United States. McHenry, IL and Washington, D.C.: Delta Systems and Center for Applied Linguistics.

Farr, M. and Nardini, G. 1996. Essayist literacy and sociolinguistic difference, in E. White, W. Lutz, and S. Kamusikiri (eds.), The politics and policies of assessment in writing. New York: Modern Language Association.

Farr, M. (ed.). 2004. Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and literacy in the city's neighborhoods. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Farr, M. (ed.). 2005. Latino language and literacy in ethnolinguistic Chicago. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Farr, M. and Dominguez, E. 2005. Mexicanos in Chicago: Language ideology and identity. In A.C. Zentella (ed.), Building on strength: Language and literacy in Latino families and communities. New York: Teachers College Press.

Farr, M. 2006. Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and identity in a transnational community. Austin: University of Texas Press. A Spanish translation was published by el Colegio de Michoacán in 2011.

Farr, M. 2010. Literacy ideologies: Local practices and cultural definitions, in J. Kalman and B. Street (eds.), Lectura, escritura y matemáticas como prácticas sociales: diálogos con América Latina. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.