Student Identity and Political Agency


Book Description

Examining the intersections of education, sociology and politics, Student Identity and Political Agency provides a unique, research-informed account of the student experience in a contemporary higher education setting. By drawing on current societal context, this book has a two-fold aim: to unpack and discuss student identity in higher education, and to identify opportunities to influence positive educational and social change. This essential text encourages readers to critically examine and explore: the marketisation and massification of higher education, the homogenising model of consumerism in higher education and the impact this holds upon the diversity of the student population, the positioning of youth and student-hood in our higher education systems, past and present forms of student political agency – protest, unionism and consumer rights – in an attempt to influence positive change. Informed by recent research, this is a crucial read for academics and researchers who specialise in the field of student identity and experience, or, more broadly, in higher education transformations. This book provides a timely and academically rigorous account of contemporary student identity and agency in the global context of higher education.







Political Worlds of Women, Student Economy Edition


Book Description

This book examines female engagement in both traditional and unconventional political arenas, including female sociability, salons, child-rearing and education, health, consumption, religious reform and nationalism.




Understanding Adolescents’ Political Agency


Book Description

This ground-breaking volume shows that young people largely shape their own political development, and that to understand young people's political development, we must consider their political agency. Håkan Stattin explores the findings of an extensive longitudinal study of the political socialization of young people in Sweden from the ages of 13 to 28, which shows that, contrary to popular belief, it is not parents, peers, teachers or other key adults who are the primary agents in shaping young people's political development; it is their own self-directed political interest. Given that political interest is both an input and an output, the book examines how political interest affects young people's political interactions with their parents, and why young people and their parents perceive these interactions differently. It covers key issues such as the impact of political-interest-triggering events and civil unrest, the role of school and peers, parental involvement and the path from political interest to future political and civic engagement. Launching a new field of research internationally, this volume is essential reading for researchers, students, educators, and policy developers interested in young people's political and civic attitudes, engagement, communication, core values and the emergence of intrinsic political sophistication.




These Kids


Book Description

Few would deny that getting ahead is a legitimate goal of learning, but the phrase implies a cruel hierarchy: a student does not simply get ahead, but gets ahead of others. In These Kids, Kysa Nygreen turns a critical eye on this paradox. Offering the voices and viewpoints of students at a “last chance” high school in California, she tells the story of students who have, in fact, been left behind. Detailing a youth-led participatory action research project that she coordinated, Nygreen uncovers deep barriers to educational success that are embedded within educational discourse itself. Struggling students internalize descriptions of themselves as “at risk,” “low achieving,” or “troubled”—and by adopting the very language of educators, they also adopt its constraints and presumption of failure. Showing how current educational discourse does not, ultimately, provide an adequate vision of change for students at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, she levies a powerful argument that social justice in education is impossible today precisely because of how we talk about it.




Feminist Politics


Book Description

The chapters in Feminist Politics contest some of the prevailing conceptualizations of identity and difference, as well as the functions of these concepts in feminist political discourse and praxis. Doing so, they amply demonstrate that issues of identity and difference have a central place in contemporary feminist scholarship. The authors of these chapters have worked to develop new ways of understanding and living out differences that will both preserve and celebrate them while also fostering the necessary conditions for opening dialogue and forming new coalitions. These efforts intend to engender imaginative new Strategies for the personal, spiritual, and sociopolitical changes that will enable human growth, well-being, and flourishing. While the focus of the work represented here is understandably on women, the issues that are raised are given additional urgency-explicitly in some of the chapters and implicitly in others-by the situation of their concerns in the context of the world created by the Bush administration. Because that administration has foregrounded issues of identity and difference in ways that are not only inhumane and often inaccurate, but also dangerous for all of us, the new ways of thinking and acting that are proposed here have a much broader application. Thus, these chapters truly invite not only feminists but all people to move in new directions. Taken as a whole, this volume represents cutting-edge thinking from an international perspective in these important and pressing areas for feminist research and praxis. Book jacket.




The Bloomsbury Handbook of Student Voice in Higher Education


Book Description

This handbook brings together scholarship from various subfields, disciplinary traditions, and geographic and geopolitical contexts to understand how student voice is operating in different higher education dimensions and contexts around the world. The handbook helps not only to map the range of student voice practices in college and university settings, but also to identify the common core elements, enabling conditions, constraints, and outcomes associated with student voice work in higher education. It offers a broad understanding of the methodologies, current debates, history, and future of the field, identifying avenues for future research.




Transnational Filipina/o/x Youth, Intersectional Identities, and School-Community Partnerships


Book Description

This book provides an in-depth examination of how Filipina mothers, serving as migrant caregivers, and their children navigate the experiences of family separation and reunification through Canada’s Live-in/Caregiver Program (L/CP). It analyses how Filipina/o/x youth understand their political agency, the legacy of colonialism, and their sense of identity and belonging in urban schools through school-community partnerships. The work examines the global migration experiences of transnational Filipina/o/x youth and their mothers in nation-states such as Canada through the lens of the global domestic work industry. It connects the theoretical frameworks of critical and intersectional feminisms within a transnational context to the specificity of settler colonialism within Canada, a white settler nation-state. It underscores the pivotal role of school-community partnerships in facilitating the political agency of Filipina mothers and their children, and in shaping Filipina/o/x youths’ transnational identities through equitable educational policies and, ultimately, im/migration policies and practices. This book is a valuable addition to the discourse on global migration, transnational feminism, and critical race studies in education. The book primarily targets scholars, researchers, graduate students in the fields of Gender Studies, Education, Psychology, Mental Health, Immigration/Transnational Studies, and Asian Canadian Studies. It is particularly relevant for those with specialist knowledge in Gender and Immigration Studies, as well as Equity and Social Justice Education, which includes a focus on supporting the participation of racialized im/migrants in the school system.




Elite Capture


Book Description

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.