Ellen Mayock

Indagaciones is a postintermediate Spanish textbook that introduces students to a wide variety of visual, audio, and written texts and teaches critical textual analysis in Spanish through a cultural studies approach. Deepening and enhancing students’ knowledge of the expression of culture within Latin America, Spain, and U.S.-Latin@ areas, Indagaciones gives students ample opportunities to practice reading, listening, and viewing cultural content and textual analysis, including understanding culture, expanding their vocabulary, and learning how to engage in analysis. Students will gain the skills to critically approach a cultural text, synthesize its main points, and prepare multimodal analyses all within a communicative context. This book provides the linguistic scaffolding necessary to help L2 students advance beyond the intermediate language level and heritage students progress by providing glosses, conceptual discussions, and grammatical information while introducing students to key texts from around the Spanish-speaking world.

This book employs the image of “shrapnel,” bits of scattered metal that can hit purposeful targets or unwitting bystanders, to narrate the story of workplace power and gender discrimination. The project interweaves stories of gender shrapnel with an examination of national rhetoric surrounding business, education, and law to uncover underlying phenomena that contribute to discourse on privilege and gender in the academic workplace. Using concrete examples that serve as case studies for subsequent discussion of data about women in the workforce, language use and misuse, sexual harassment, silence and shutting up, and hiring, training, promotion, and the glass ceiling, Mayock explores the deeper implications of gender inequity in the workplace.