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Class Action
May 2008 E-news:
Class and Youth
In this Issue
1. New Deputy Director at Class Action
2. New Resource on Class from Class Action: Class and Education
3. Class and Youth - guest editor Elsa Brown
4. Book of the Month: Women Without Class
5. Featured Articles on Class and Youth
6. Resources: video, links, blogs, and books
7. Action of the Month
8. Take our Survey
9. Call for Submissions
1. New Deputy Director at Class Action
Class Action is thrilled to introduce Kristen Golden, our new Deputy Director. Kristen brings with her a wealth of experience in the social justice world including her work at Ms. magazine, Ms. Foundation for Women’s Take Our Daughters to Work Day, and Safe Passage, a domestic violence prevention agency, where she was the executive director for 5 years.
"My vision is to ensure that Class Action becomes a more visible national presence and its goal of inspiring action to end classism becomes a rallying cry in communities across the country."
You can read more about her here...
2. New Resource on Class from Class Action: Class and Education
Felice Yeskel, Class Action's Executive Director, recently guest-edited an edition of the journal Equity in Excellence in Education.
Felice's article "Coming to Class: Looking at Education through the Lens of Class: Introduction to the Class and Education Special Issue" frames the issue which includes:
Class Struggle in Higher Education, by Dan Clawson & Mishy Leiblum; The Dynamics of Social Reproduction: How Class Works at a State College and Elite Private College Author, by Maynard Seider; Double Jeopardy: The Compounding Effects of Class and Race in School Mathematics by Jae Hoon Lim; and Race, Social Background, and School Choice Options by Kimberly A. Goyette
Click Here to order the journal online.
3. Class and Youth
One of the first things asked of participants at Class Action’s Exploring Class workshops is to think about your class background when you were a child. Your attention is directed to experiences of growing up, living at home, going to school, and being with family. Participants use those memories to consider when they first realized their own class in relation to others around them. While it is easy for us as adults to see how our experiences while growing up influenced and shaped our class backgrounds, it’s harder to see what class experiences young people today are dealing with right now.
How do young people talk about class? How can adults help young people become empowered to address class in their own lives? Where are youth class experiences created, experienced, discussed, and analyzed?
Today these spaces of class experience include school, home, shopping malls, and community spaces; as well as virtual spaces that overlap into public and private areas of life with social networking websites, blogs, online videos, and advertising images. The material provided in this month’s enews touches on all of these elements to help us better understand current youth class experiences in today’s society and how we can make an impact and support youth through these experiences.
4. Book of the month:
Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity by Julie Bettie
Review by Jennifer McNulty
A detailed portrait of senior high school girls at a California high school, Bettie's book lays bare the ways in which young women's lives are too often oversimplified by one-dimensional, gender-focused popular analyses like Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. Girls are, in fact, engaged in a far more complex process of identity formation that guides their choices and shapes their futures, said Bettie, who points to historical and structural forces that shape the lives of contemporary girls, including the growth of low-wage, service-sector jobs, changes in family structure, and changing laws on affirmative action and bilingual education...read more.
5. Featured Articles on Class and Youth
Free Lunch Isn’t Cool So Some Students Go Hungry by Carol Pogash
Although Francisco Velazquez, a 14-year-old freshman with spiky hair and sunglasses, qualifies for a free lunch at Balboa High School here, he was not eating...read more.
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Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline by Booth Gunter and Jamie Kizzire
Across America, countless school children -- particularly impoverished children of color -- are being pushed out of schools and into juvenile lockups for minor misconduct that in an earlier era would have warranted counseling or a trip to the principal's office rather than a court appearance...read more.
6. Resources: video, links, blogs, and books
Online video:
Global Action Project YouTube Channel
Links:
The Free Child Project: Youth-Led Social Change
Resource Generation: Young people with financial wealth affecting social change
Wiretap Magazine: Ideas and Action for a New Generation
National Network for Youth: Giving Homeless Youth a Voice
National Center for Children in Poverty: Promoting the economic security, health, and well-being of America’s low-income families and children.
Blog Entry:
“Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace” Danah Boyd's Blog
Books:
American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods by Adrie Kusserow, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
If A Tree Falls at Lunch Period by Gennifer Choldenko, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2007. This is a good read for youth looking for books that talk about class.
Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change: New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy for America’s Youth edited by Pedro Noguera, Julio Cammarota and Shawn Ginwright, New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor and Francis group, 2006.
The Color of Love: A Mother's Choice in the Jim Crow South
by Gene Cheek, Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2005.
Cheek spins a mesmerizing yarn, told from a little boy's viewpoint, of
growing up poor and white in 1950s North Carolina.
Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation by Barbara Findlen, New York, NY: Seal Press, 1995.
Online Radio:
Youth Radio: In this collection of personal narratives and features, Youth Radio documents the world of young people in New Orleans post Katrina.
7. Action of the Month: Supporting Young Filmmakers
Since 1991, The Global Action Project has provided media arts and leadership training for thousands of young people living in underserved communities, from New York to Croatia to Guatemala to the Middle East and beyond. Their mission is to provide youth with the knowledge, tools, and relationships they need to create powerful, thought-provoking media on local and international issues that concern them, and to use their media as a catalyst for dialogue and social change.
Go to our Action page for more information.
8. Take our Survey
What's the most memorable symbol of class from your childhood?
Submit a response here. Read other survey responses here.
9. Call for Submissions- This is not a Class Action project
Still Blue: More Writing By (For or About)Working-Class Queers
Following the success of Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction by
Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life, a new anthology on queer, working-class themes is currently in preparation.
Writers are encouraged to send their work for possible inclusion in the
new volume, tentatively entitled Still Blue: More Writing By (For or About) Working-Class Queers.
Writers of any and all genders are welcome!
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