Mariana Becker

Areas of Expertise

  • sociology and anthropology of immigration and education
  • critical childhood studies
  • English as a second language, dual-language, and bilingual education
  • equity in multilingual and multicultural contexts

Interests

  • educational trajectories and experiences of im/migrant children and youth
  • im/migrant children, families, and communities
  • young children's border thinking and critical consciousness

Concentrations

Education

  •  PhD in Curriculum & Instruction, 2023
    Boston College
  •  Masters of Arts in Applied Linguistics, 2018
    University of Massachusetts Boston
  •  Masters of Arts in Linguistics, 2015
    Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
  •  Bachelors of Arts in Letras (Português-Inglês), 2013
    Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

Contact

 706-542-4424 (office)

Research Summary

Dr. Mariana Lima Becker is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research is situated at the intersection of education for bi/multilingual learners, im/migration, and language and literacy studies. Grounded in critical childhood studies and decolonial transborder approaches, her ethnographic inquiry centers racialized bilingual children with recent histories of migration, foregrounding how they (co-)construct belonging and subalternized knowledge in and out of schools. Lima Becker’s dissertation project explored the everyday experiences of children with ties across Brazil and U.S. in their elementary school, exploring children’s roles as implementers of a new bilingual education program and their (trans)border thinking at the margins of their classrooms. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including TESOL Quarterly, the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Childhood, Global Studies of Childhood, and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

Grants

2022 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
2022 Summer Research Grant by the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College
2021 Doctoral Dissertation Grant by The International Research Foundation for English Language Education