Whose School Is It? Women, Children, Memory, And Practice in the City

"A gem.... A gripping book that conveys so much insight and illumination into the construction of educational identities in working-class urban communities that it must be shared."-- Anita Puckett, Director, Appalachian Studies Program, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityWhose School Is It?: Women, Children, Memory, and Practice in the City is a success story with roadblocks, crashes, and detours. Rhoda Halperin uses feminist theorist and activist Gloria Anzaldu a's ideas about borderlands created by colliding cultures to deconstruct the creation and advancement of a public community charter school in a diverse, long-lived urban neighborhood on the Ohio River. Class, race, and gender mix with age, local knowledge, and place authenticity to create a page-turning story of grit, humor, and sheer stubbornness. The school has grown and flourished in the face of daunting market forces, class discrimination, and an increasingly unfavorable national climate for charter schools. Borderlands are tense spaces. The school is a microcosm of the global city.Many theoretical strands converge in this book-- feminist theory, ideas about globalization, class analysis, and accessible narrative writing-- to present some new approaches in urban anthropology. The book is multi-voiced and nuanced in ways that provide authenticity and texture to the real circumstances of urban lives. At the same time, identities are threatened as community practices clash with rules and regulations imposed by outsiders.Since it is based on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in the community and the city, Whose School Is It? brings unique long-term perspectives on continuitiesand disjunctures in cities. Halperin's work as researcher and advocate also provides insider perspectives that are rare in the literature of urban anthropology.Halperin, Rhoda H. is the author of 'Whose School Is It? Women, Children, Memory, And Practice in the City', published 2006 under ISBN 9780292709911 and ISBN 0292709919.