Whose 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 Anzaldúa'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 continuities and disjunctures in cities. Halperin's work as researcher and advocate also provides insider perspectives that are rare in the literature of urban anthropology.
The East End Community Heritage School (EECHS) was originally established in a diverse working class riverfront neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. EECHS has now been displaced to a third location ...outside of its community of origin. The displacements generate increased levels of routine, everyday violence for the kids and raise questions about the school's sustainability, the community served by the school, the possibilities of a working class imagined community in the school, and the impacts, financial, educational and ideological, of school resettlement on families, children and youth.
Whose School Is It?: Women, Children, Memory, and Practice in the Cityis a success story with roadblocks, crashes, and detours. Rhoda Halperin uses feminist theorist and activist Gloria Anzaldúa'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 continuities and disjunctures in cities. Halperin's work as researcher and advocate also provides insider perspectives that are rare in the literature of urban anthropology.
This chapter explores the “moral meanings” that intersect with economic realities in the context of a Cincinnati community school located in a diverse working-class neighborhood. The focus is on ...informal support systems for kids that require adults to expend considerable resources on community children. These practices grow out of a ritualized community ethos of “doing whatever it takes.” Work, gifts, food, and housing are all tied to an informal economy embedded in a grassroots social movement that is based on a strong commitment to taking care of community children. Beyond job descriptions, and, in many instances, in spite of them, community people go the extra mile. There is a sense of commitment and morality, tied with notions of doing what is right, and with taking care of community children, broadly conceived as working-class youth. The goal of this agenda is to bring kids up to speed in the face of poor public education and class and race discrimination. From a ritual economy perspective, the community school materializes the values and beliefs of the community and, at the same time, shapes the community's worldview.
