Synopses & Reviews
Every major political and social dispute of the twentieth century has been fought on the backs of our children, from the economic reforms of the progressive era through the social readjustments of civil rights era and on to the current explosion of anxieties about everything from the national debt to the digital revolution. Far from noncombatants whom we seek to protect from the contamination posed by adult knowledge, children form the very basis on which we fight over the nature and values of our society, and over our hopes and fears for the future.
Unfortunately, our understanding of childhood and children has not kept pace with their crucial and rapidly changing roles in our culture. Pulling together a range of different thinkers who have rethought the myths of childhood innocence, The Children's Culture Reader develops a profile of children as creative and critical thinkers who shape society even as it shapes them. Representing a range of thinking from history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, women's studies, literature, and media studies, The Children's Culture Reader focuses on issues of parent-child relations, child labor, education, play, and especially the relationship of children to mass media and consumer culture. The contributors include Martha Wolfenstein, Philippe Aries, Jacqueline Rose, James Kincaid, Lynn Spigel, Valerie Walkerdine, Ellen Seiter, Annette Kuhn, Eve Sedgwick, Henry Giroux, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
Including a groundbreaking introduction by the editor and a sourcebook section which excerpts a range of material from popular magazines to child rearing guides from the past 75 years, The Children's Culture Reader will propel our understanding of children and childhood into the next century.
Review
"This wonderful collection is a key intervention in the analysis of intensifying poverty in the globalizing United States from both street-level ethnography and political economy vantages. The contributors document the lives—and lavishly quote the narratives—of impoverished American residents across lines of race, gender, nationality, and regional location. They give us historical perspective and up-to-the-minute critiques, and we gain a fresh and strongly grounded understanding of 'welfare reform,' 'multiculturalism,' and 'the new urbanism': the multi-layered horrors of the marketizing policies imposed on all the poor in our era of neoliberal triumph."-Micaela di Leonardo,Northwestern University
Review
"These contributions provide a dynamic understanding of poverty and immiseration."-North American Dialogue,Vol. 4, No. 1, Nov. 2001
Review
"The New Poverty Studies takes us to immigrant communities, work places, homeless shelters, and urban neighborhoods to examine the heart-rending stories of Chinese newcomers caught in a system of wage-slavery, the tedium of labor in fast food restaurants, the search for housing to match income from minimum wage jobs, and the web of cash checking stores and pawn shops that fostered indebtedness in low-income communities. What emerges is the centrality of human agency and the struggles of real people, rather than the bankrupt image of poor Americans as marginalized victims of larger economic forces."-Louise Lamphere,University of New Mexico
Review
"This wonderful collection is a key intervention in the analysis of intensifying poverty in the globalizing United States from both street-level ethnography and political economy vantages. The contributors document the lives—and lavishly quote the narratives—of impoverished American residents across lines of race, gender, nationality, and regional location. They give us historical perspective and up-to-the-minute critiques, and we gain a fresh and strongly grounded understanding of 'welfare reform,' 'multiculturalism,' and 'the new urbanism': the multi-layered horrors of the marketizing policies imposed on all the poor in our era of neoliberal triumph."
"These contributions provide a dynamic understanding of poverty and immiseration."
"The New Poverty Studies takes us to immigrant communities, work places, homeless shelters, and urban neighborhoods to examine the heart-rending stories of Chinese newcomers caught in a system of wage-slavery, the tedium of labor in fast food restaurants, the search for housing to match income from minimum wage jobs, and the web of cash checking stores and pawn shops that fostered indebtedness in low-income communities. What emerges is the centrality of human agency and the struggles of real people, rather than the bankrupt image of poor Americans as marginalized victims of larger economic forces."
Review
"These contributions provide a dynamic understanding of poverty and immiseration."
Synopsis
Stock market euphoria and blind faith in the post-Cold War economy have driven the topic of poverty from popular and scholarly discussion in the United States. At the same time the gap between the rich and poor has never been wider. The New Poverty Studies critically examines the new war against the poor that has accompanied the rise of the New Economy in the past two decades, and details the myriad ways poor people have struggled against it.
In updating the 1960s encounter between ethnography and U.S. poverty, The New Poverty Studies highlights the ways poverty is constructed across multiple scales and multiple axes of difference.
Questioning the common wisdom that poverty persists because of the pathology, social isolation and welfare state "dependency" of the poor, the contributors to The New Poverty Studies point instead to economic restructuring and neoliberal policy "reforms" which have caused increased social inequality and economic polarization in the U.S.
Synopsis
Stock market euphoria and blind faith in the post cold war economy have driven the topic of poverty from popular and scholarly discussion in the United States. At the same time the gap between the rich and poor has never been wider.
The New Poverty Studies critically examines the new war against the poor that has accompanied the rise of the New Economy in the past two decades, and details the myriad ways poor people have struggled against it.
The essays collected here explore how global, national, and local structures of power produce poverty and affect the material well-being, social relations and politicization of the poor. In updating the 1960s encounter between ethnography and U.S. poverty, The New Poverty Studies highlights the ways poverty is constructed across multiple scales and multiple axes of difference.
Questioning the common wisdom that poverty persists because of the pathology, social isolation and welfare state "dependency" of the poor, the contributors to The New Poverty Studies point instead to economic restructuring and neoliberal policy "reforms" which have caused increased social inequality and economic polarization in the U.S.
Contributors include: Georges Fouron, Donna Goldstein, Judith Goode, Susan B. Hyatt, Catherine Kingfisher, Peter Kwong, Vin Lyon-Callo, Jeff Maskovsky, Sandi Morgen, Leith Mullings, Frances Fox Piven, Matthew Rubin, Nina Glick Schiller, Carol Stack, Jill Weigt, Eve Weinbaum, Brett Williams, and Patricia Zavella.
"These contributions provide a dynamic understanding of poverty and immiseration"
North American Dialogue, Vol. 4, No. 1, Nov. 2001
About the Author
Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He was previously the DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and the Founder/Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. The author or editor of eleven books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Jenkins also writes a regular column for Technology Review.