Location: Boren Hall 173
E-mail: dsong@ou.edu
Phone: 405-325-0756
Education
David Shuang Song's work examines the experiences of and practices directed toward Chinese-diasporic and other Asian-diasporic youth in the American public education system, especially concerning academic inequality, multilingualism, and race. His current book project, Multiracial Mandarin, is an ethnographic study of the ethnic and racial dynamics of Mandarin language education in a working-class San Francisco-area high school, attending to the relationship between educational equity, school culture, and language pedagogy. He is also co-writing a book on ethnicity and race, friendship-making, and institutional diversity projects in higher education, using social network analysis, titled Diversity Ends. His work has been published in Amerasia Journal and through the National Bureau of Economic Research and is forthcoming in Race, Ethnicity, and Education and the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. He was born in Wuhan, China.
Dr. Song's courses generally address ethnicity and race in the United States, with particular attention to Asian Americans (and Asians in America), ethnography, and the formal education system. His teaching agenda draws from the tradition of ethnic studies and critical education research, encouraging students to examine structural inequalities, violence, and power dynamics in society. Topics include American imperialism and settler colonialism, European colonialism, ghettoization and incarceration, pan-ethnicity, migration from the Global South to the United States, and symbolic violence.
As a social scientist, Dr. Song challenges students to break with hegemonic concepts of ethnicity and race. He encourages them to define these terms coherently and consider how they may differ from seemingly commonsense logic. As an Asian Americanist, he invites students to understand the historically constituted voicings of "Asian American" identity through activism, fiction, public policy, and disciplinary scholarship, while also recognizing gaps and missing intervals within this identity. Pedagogically, Dr. Song aims to foster student-centered discussions in which students engage consciously with course texts, the instructor, and, most importantly, each other. He also encourages self-reflection, helping students consider themselves as active agents in the learning process.
Research Interests
Asian American Studies
Cultural Sociology
Educational Linguistics and Heritage Languages
Ethnography and Schooling
Sociology of Education
Sociology of Diaspora and Migration
Courses Taught
HON 2973: Ethnicity, Race, and Other Tricky Concepts
HON 2973: Asian American Studies
HON 3993: Reading Schools: Ethnicity and Race, Ethnography, and Education
