The authors bring you in this edited volume a collection of essays that address the relationship between racial violence, media, the criminal justice system, and education. This book is unique in that it brings together the perspectives of university professors, artists, poets, community activists, classroom teachers, and legal experts. With the Trayvon Martin murder and legal proceedings at the center of reflection and analysis, authors poignantly provide insight into how racial violence is institutionalized and consumed by the mass public. Authors borrow from educational theory, history, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, the arts, legal scholarship, and personal reflection to begin the dialogue on how to move toward education for racial and social justice. The book is recommended for secondary educators, community organizers, undergraduate and graduate social science and education courses.
Borrowing from the ideas of John Dewey, schools and classrooms are a reflection of the world; therefore, in order to make sense of the urban classroom, we need to make sense of the world. In this book, the editors have compiled a collection of nine critical essays, or chapters, each examining a particular contemporary national and/or international event. The essays each undertake an explicit approach to naming oppression and addressing it in the context of urban schooling. Each essay has a two-fold purpose. The first purpose is to help readers see the world unveiled, through a more critical lens, and to problematize long held beliefs about urban classrooms, with regard to race, gender, social class, equity, and access. Second, as each author draws parallels between an event and urban classrooms, a better understanding of the microstructures that exist in urban classrooms emerges. “At a time of serious political, economic, and social uncertainty, we need a book like this, one that showcases how the world can be seen as a critical site of curriculum and pedagogy. A powerful intersectional analysis of the world, word, and urban sociopolitical context, authors in this book push the boundaries of what educators know and do in urban schools and classrooms. Grounded in frameworks of critical race theory and culturally relevant pedagogy, authors center essential societal moments that must be viewed as the real curriculum. These moments can equip students with tools to examine ‘the what of the world’ as well as how to examine, critique, challenge, and disrupt individual, systemic, and structural realities and practices that perpetuate and maintain a racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic status quo. This is an important, forward-thinking, innovative book – a welcome addition to the field of urban education.” – H. Richard Milner IV, Helen Faison Chair of Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh
Winner of the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men, postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more often black. After Reconstruction, lynchings exhibited and embodied links between violent collective action, American civic identity, and the making of the nation. Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community. Grounded in Ida B. Wells’s summation of lynching as a social contract among whites to maintain a racial order, at its core, Ore’s book speaks to racialized violence as a mode of civic engagement. Since violence enacts an argument about citizenship, Ore construes lynching and its expressions as part and parcel of America’s rhetorical tradition and political legacy. Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. In doing so, she demonstrates how lynching functioned as a strategy interwoven with the formation of America’s national identity and with the nation’s need to continually restrict and redefine that identity. In addition, Ore ties black resistance to lynching, the acclaimed exhibit Without Sanctuary, recent police brutality, effigies of Barack Obama, and the killing of Trayvon Martin.
The Grammar of School Discipline examines how seemingly discrete school discipline policies and practices constitute a particular grammar: Removal, Resistance and Reform. Weaving numeric data with portraits of students and school practitioners, the authors detail a nuanced landscape of school discipline in Alabama and its anti-Black foundations. The removal of Black students can be traced to the antebellum construction of Blackness as criminal, deviant, and deserving of punishment. A focus on resistance centers the agency that students and practitioners exercise despite anti-Black removal. An exploration of specific reform efforts emphasizes that even the most well-intentioned and well-organized reforms are limited when the removal of students remains an option for practitioners. The authors end with an appeal to educational stakeholders to repair the harms that these anti-Black policies and practices inflict on students and communities, and thus move towards repairing the damage that white supremacy inflicts on everyone’s humanity.
This groundbreaking volume brings together major figures in Disability Studies in Education (DSE) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to explore some of today’s most important issues in education. Scholars examine the achievement/opportunity gaps from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as the overrepresentation of minority students in special education and the school-to-prison pipeline. Chapters also address school reform and the impact on students based on race, class, and dis/ability and the capacity of law and policy to include (and exclude). Readers will discover how some students are included (and excluded) within schools and society, why some citizens are afforded expanded (or limited) opportunities in life, and who moves up in the world and who is trapped at the “bottom of the well.” Contributors: D.L. Adams, Susan Baglieri, Stephen J. Ball, Alicia Broderick, Kathleen M. Collins, Nirmala Erevelles, Edward Fergus, Zanita E. Fenton, David Gillborn, Kris Guitiérrez, Kathleen A. King Thorius, Elizabeth Kozleski, Zeus Leonardo, Claustina Mahon-Reynolds, Elizabeth Mendoza, Christina Paguyo, Laurence Parker, Nicola Rollock, Paolo Tan, Sally Tomlinson, and Carol Vincent “With a stunning set of authors, this book provokes outrage and possibility at the rich intersection of critical race, class, and disability studies, refracting back on educational policy and practices, inequities and exclusions but marking also spaces for solidarities. This volume is a must-read for preservice, and long-term educators, as the fault lines of race, (dis)ability, and class meet in the belly of educational reform movements and educational justice struggles.” —Michelle Fine, distinguished professor of Critical Psychology and Urban Education, The Graduate Center, CUNY “Offers those who sincerely seek to better understand the complexity of the intersection of race/ethnicity, dis/ability, social class, and gender a stimulating read that sheds new light on the root of some of our long-standing societal and educational inequities.” —Wanda J. Blanchett, distinguished professor and dean, Rutgers University, Graduate School of Education
Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research in a high school E.L.L. classroom, this study contributes to the fields of new literacies studies and critical pedagogy by showing how transnational Black youth theorize and negotiate intersections of racism, justice, and education. Drawing on a multidimensional approach for understanding how racism is reproduced and resisted across various domains of power, the author shows how two young men from Haiti theorize the U.N. and INGO occupation of post-earthquake Haiti; a disjuncture between how Africa and Haiti are (mis)known in the U.S. and students’ lived realities in their respective countries of origin; and finally, students’ analysis of structural racism in the U.S. through a Justice for Trayvon unit that was co-taught from March-May 2012, when Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and Stand Your Ground became household names. The author concludes by suggesting that we move toward a “lessons against white supremacies” framework for critical pedagogy. This framework draws on centering counter–narratives and thinking through the notion of decolonial love to reframe everyday classroom praxis. Culturally informed, antiracist pedagogies must begin with students’ theoretical work and experiential knowledge. Such an approach transforms classrooms into spaces for students to not only interrogate racism but also create (counter) texts that represent their subjectivities as young Black people in the 21st century.
Be a part of the radical transformation to honor and respect Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls! This book is a collective call to action for educational justice and fairness for all Black Girls – Beautiful, Brilliant. This book engages willing and knowledgeable educators to disrupt and transform their learning spaces by presenting: Detailed chapters rooted in scholarship, lived experiences, and practice Activities, recommendations, shorter personal narratives, and poetry honoring Black Girls Resources centering Black female protagonists Companion videos illustrating first-hand experiences of Black Girls and women Tools in authentically connecting with Black Girls so they can do more than survive – they can thrive.
Children’s leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices, too. However, our current understandings of these processes are race-blind and based mostly on the experiences of white middle-class families. Drawing on an innovative study of middle-class British Indian families, this book brings children’s and parents’ voices to the forefront and bridges childhood studies, family studies and leisure studies to theorise children’s leisure from a fresh perspective. Demonstrating the salience of both race and class in shaping leisure cultures within middle-class racialised families, this is an invaluable contribution to key sociological debates around leisure, childhoods and parenting ideologies.
Explores childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability to interrogate what “the child” makes possible The concept of childhood contains many contested and ambivalent meanings that have extraordinary implications, particularly for those staking their claim for belonging and justice on the wish for inclusion within it. In Ambivalent Childhoods, Jacob Breslow examines contemporary U.S. social justice movements (including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and antideportation movements) to discover and reveal how childhood operates within and against them. Ambivalent Childhoods brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with“the psychic life of the child” that combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements, Breslow demonstrates how childhood requires sustained attention as a complex and ambivalent site for contesting the workings of power, not only for the young. Ambivalent Childhoods is a forward-thinking and intersectional analysis of how childhood affects activism, national belonging, and the violence directed against queer, trans, and racialized people.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on every aspect of our social, cultural, and commercial lives, including the world of sport. This book examines the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the intersection of COVID-19 and sport. The book goes beyond simple description of the impact of the pandemic on sport to offer normative judgments on how the sporting world responded to challenges posed by COVID-19, as well as philosophical speculation as to how COVID-19 will change our understanding and appreciation of sport in the long term. It examines the considerations that either influenced—or arguably should have influenced—decisions to continue or to resume the playing of organized sport in the midst of a pandemic. As a part of this analysis, a spotlight is shone on how sport intersected with political issues surrounding COVID-19. It also explores the configuration and meaning of sport in the COVID-19 era, touching on themes such as the nature of sport and its integrity and sport’s relationship to technology. Other themes include the changed nature of spectatorship, suffering in sport during pandemic times, and the impact of COVID-19 on the Olympic and Paralympic Games. A final chapter looks ahead and asks what sport might look like in a post-COVID world. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the ethics and philosophy of sport, the sociology of sport, event studies, politics, or public health.
