Results by title

89 books match the query 'Communities' and 6 start with r

cover of Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities

Race in the Schoolyard

Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities

Lewis, Amanda E

Rutgers University Press, 2003

"Race in the Schoolyard is a wonderful book for social scientists studying race, education, and childhood studies. The book showcases the talents of a gifted fieldworker whose theoretically rich work sits on the cutting edge of a growing body of scholarship examining the social worlds of children. School officials, parents, and, most especially, a new generation of teachers will benefit from these lessons on race."-American Journal of Sociology

"Instructors may recommend this book to students to whom the topic is surely vital and engrossing and for whom the text will be lively and engaging."-Contemporary Sociology

"Lewis moves beyond traditional research methods used to examine achievement gaps and differences in test scores to look closely at the realities of schooling. I highly recommend this work for every person involved in teaching and learning."-Multicultural Review

"Through eloquent case studies of three California elementary schools-a white-majority 'good' school, a mostly minority 'tough' school, and an integrated 'alternative' school-[Lewis] demonstrates that schools promote racial inequalities through their daily rituals and practices. Even the notion of a "color-blind" America-an especially popular ideal in the white school-perpetuates racism, Lewis argues, because it denies or dismisses the very real constraints that schools place on minorities. Lewis is nevertheless an optimist, insisting that schools can change ideas of race. . . . Highly recommended. Undergraduate collections and above."-Choice

"In this pioneering ethnography in elementary schools, Lewis shows brilliantly how racism is taught and learned in the small places of everyday life."-Joe Feagin, University of Florida and author of Racist America

"A wonderful and timely book. Ethnographically rich, theoretically sophisticated, and clearly written, this book addresses the ubiquitous issue of race in all its complexity."-Michèle Foster, author of Black Teachers on Teaching

"A compelling ethnography of the racial landscape of contemporary schools."-Barrie Thorne, author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School

Could your kids be learning a fourth R at school: reading, writing, 'rithmatic, and race?

Race in the Schoolyard takes us to a place most of us seldom get to see in action¾ our children's classrooms¾ and reveals the lessons about race that are communicated there. Amanda E. Lewis spent a year observing classes at three elementary schools, two multiracial urban and one white suburban. While race of course is not officially taught like multiplication and punctuation, she finds that it nonetheless insinuates itself into everyday life in schools.

Lewis explains how the curriculum, both expressed and hidden, conveys many racial lessons. While teachers and other school community members verbally deny the salience of race, she illustrates how it does influence the way they understand the world, interact with each other, and teach children. This eye-opening text is important reading for educators, parents, and scholars alike.

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cover of Radical Cartographies: Participatory Mapmaking from Latin America

Radical Cartographies

Participatory Mapmaking from Latin America

Edited by Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale

University of Texas Press, 2020

Cartography has a troubled history as a technology of power. The production and distribution of maps, often understood to be ideological representations that support the interests of their developers, have served as tools of colonization, imperialism, and global development, advancing Western notions of space and place at the expense of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities. But over the past two decades, these marginalized populations have increasingly turned to participatory mapping practices to develop new, innovative maps that reassert local concepts of place and space, thus harnessing the power of cartography in their struggles for justice.

In twelve essays written by community leaders, activists, and scholars, Radical Cartographies critically explores the ways in which participatory mapping is being used by Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other traditional groups in Latin America to preserve their territories and cultural identities. Through this pioneering volume, the authors fundamentally rethink the role of maps, with significant lessons for marginalized communities across the globe, and launch a unique dialogue about the radical edge of a new social cartography.

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cover of Realizing Educational Rights: Advancing School Reform through Courts and Communities

Realizing Educational Rights

Advancing School Reform through Courts and Communities

Anne Newman

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Realizing Educational Rights, Anne Newman examines two educational rights questions that arise at the intersection of political theory, educational policy, and law: What is the place of a right to education in a participatory democracy, and how can we realize this right in the United States? Tracking these questions across both philosophical and pragmatic terrain, she addresses urgent moral and political questions, offering a rare, double-pronged look at educational justice in a democratic society.

Newman argues that an adequate K–12 education is the right of all citizens, as a matter of equality, and emphasizes that this right must be shielded from the sway of partisan and majoritarian policy making far more than it currently is. She then examines how educational rights are realized in our current democratic structure, offering two case studies of leading types of rights-based activism: school finance litigation on the state level and the mobilization of citizens through community-based organizations. Bringing these case studies together with rich philosophical analysis, Realizing Educational Rights advances understanding of the relationships among moral and legal rights, education reform, and democratic politics. 
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cover of Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon

Rethinking Community in Myanmar

Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon

Judith Beyer

National University of Singapore Press, 2023

Striking new insights into understanding community in Myanmar In this first anthropological study of Muslim and Hindu lives in urban Myanmar today, Beyer develops the concept of ‘we-formation’ to demonstrate that individuals are always more than members of wider groups. ‘We-formation’ complements her rich political, legal and historical analysis of ‘community’, a term used by Beyer’s interlocutors themselves, even as it reinforces ethno-religious stereotypes and their own minority status. The book also offers an interpretation of the dynamics of resistance to the attempted military coup of 2021.
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cover of Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town

Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town

Laura Hart

Rutgers University Press, 2023

In disease cluster communities across the country, environmental contamination from local industries is often suspected as a source of disease. But civic action is notoriously hampered by the slow response from government agencies to investigate the cause of disease and the complexities of risk assessment. 

In Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town, Laura Hart examines another understudied dimension of community inaction: the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging, disconnect, and disruption in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context where the imperative for self-protection is elusive, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Considering a future where debates about risk and science will inevitably increase, Hart considers possibilities for the democratization of risk management and the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.
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cover of Rooms with a View: The Stages of Community in the Modern Theater

Rooms with a View

The Stages of Community in the Modern Theater

Richard L. Barr

University of Michigan Press, 1998

In Sam Shepard's play Action a character asks, "What's a community?" only to find that no one really knows. Rooms with a View attempts to chart the development of communal concepts through the discourse of dramatic modernism, defining a coherent pattern that illustrates and anticipates innovations in modern and postmodern social theory. To clarify the commonplace notion that audiences actively participate in dramatic art, the intro-ductory chapter theorizes a performance community, which audience, actors, and other backstage actants (such as playwrights and directors) provisionally form in the theater. Connecting psychological, sociological, and aesthetic insights ranging from Freud to Kohut, from Simmel to Nancy, and from Artaud and Brecht to Arnheim and Jellicoe, Richard Barr shows how modernist thinkers are repeatedly drawn to the ideal of communion. The distinctive structure of this collective inquiry helps untangle the roots and routes of modern drama and social thought. Barr analyzes the social and aesthetic theory of four in-fluential dramatists. Ibsen and Strindberg, he claims, explore ways of acknowledging the integrity of individual viewpoints while maintaining collective coherence. Pirandello and, in more radical ways, Beckett, conclude that conflict and division are not simply inevitable but invaluable in organizing alternative perspectives. By analyzing the ways playwrights variously conceive and achieve the complicated unity called community, Rooms with a View produces the rich paradox that difference may make the most difference in creative communal consensus. Richard L. Barr holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and has taught English at Rutgers University. He is currently a specialist in intersubjective relations, practicing in New Jersey and Switzerland.
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