Synopses & Reviews
Revolutionary Doctors gives readers a first-hand account of Venezuela's innovative and inspiring program of community healthcare, designed to serve--and largely carried out by--the poor themselves. Drawing on long-term participant observations as well as in-depth research, Brouwer tells the story of Venezuela's Integral Community Medicine program, in which doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to recruit and train doctors from among peasants and workers. Such programs were first developed in Cuba, and Cuban medical personnel play a key role in Venezuela today as advisors and organizers. This internationalist model has been a great success--Cuba is a world leader in medicine and medical training--and Brouwer shows how the Venezuelans are now, with the aid of their Cuban counterparts, following suit.
But this program is not without its challenges. It has faced much hostility from traditional Venezuelan doctors as well as all the forces antagonistic to the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions. Despite the obstacles it describes, Revolutionary Doctors demonstrates how a society committed to the well-being of its poorest people can actually put that commitment into practice, by delivering essential healthcare through the direct empowerment of the people it aims to serve.
Review
"Invites us to learn from a group of inner-city youth as they forge their identities and engage the barriers and opportunities they face growing up in America today. This book embodies the best of activist scholarship. The successes and failures of a liberatory and participatory action research project are described with precision, humor, and self-criticism as we learn how alliances among a diverse group of urban youth and adults in their lives were crafted and then served as a basis for collaborative action. . . . Offers psychologists, social researchers, and activists a rare opportunity to hear stories from the lives of urban youth in their own words. The social analyses and practices described here challenge us to rethink our understandings of adolescent development."-M. Brinton Lykes,Professor of Community/Social Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Boston College
Review
"A groundbreaking feminist participatory action research project with urban youth. McIntyre develops long term relationships and collaborative action research with 12 and 13 year olds schooled in a building with bullet proof windows. Surrounded by the crush of violence, trash, racism, and sexism, the kids frame their own questions, take cameras into their hands, narrate their own stories, and take action to effect change in their community and, ultimately, their lives. They affirm the potential of feminist participatory action research to create hopeful spaces for kids' voices, visions, and activism."-Patricia Maguire,author of Doing Participatory Research: A Feminist Approach
Review
"Invites us to learn from a group of inner-city youth as they forge their identities and engage the barriers and opportunities they face growing up in America today. This book embodies the best of activist scholarship. The successes and failures of a liberatory and participatory action research project are described with precision, humor, and self-criticism as we learn how alliances among a diverse group of urban youth and adults in their lives were crafted and then served as a basis for collaborative action. . . . Offers psychologists, social researchers, and activists a rare opportunity to hear stories from the lives of urban youth in their own words. The social analyses and practices described here challenge us to rethink our understandings of adolescent development."
"Alice McIntyre offers the unflinching gaze of an astute researcher. . . . Essential reading for teachers, counselors, and all youth workers. McIntyre's frank assessment of participatory action research and her careful analysis of her original data demonstrate PAR at its best."
"A groundbreaking feminist participatory action research project with urban youth. McIntyre develops long term relationships and collaborative action research with 12 and 13 year olds schooled in a building with bullet proof windows. Surrounded by the crush of violence, trash, racism, and sexism, the kids frame their own questions, take cameras into their hands, narrate their own stories, and take action to effect change in their community and, ultimately, their lives. They affirm the potential of feminist participatory action research to create hopeful spaces for kids' voices, visions, and activism."
Review
"Alice McIntyre offers the unflinching gaze of an astute researcher. . . . Essential reading for teachers, counselors, and all youth workers. McIntyre's frank assessment of participatory action research and her careful analysis of her original data demonstrate PAR at its best."-Mary Brabeck,Professor and Dean, Lynch School of Education, Boston College
Review
“Steve Brouwer is one of the nation's best front-line reporters from the ongoing class war.”
-Barbara Ehrenreich,
Synopsis
Urban teens of color are often portrayed as welfare mothers, drop outs, drug addicts, and both victims and perpetrators of the many kinds of violence which can characterize life in urban areas. Although urban youth often live in contexts which include poverty, unemployment, and discrimination, they also live with the everydayness of school, friends, sex, television, music, and other elements of teenage lives.
Inner City Kids explores how a group of African American, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Haitian adolescents make meaning of and respond to living in an inner-city community.
The book focuses on areas of particular concern to the youth, such as violence, educational opportunities, and a decaying and demoralizing urban environment characterized by trash, pollution, and abandoned houses. McIntyre's work with these teens draws upon participatory action research, which seeks to codevelop programs with study participants rather than for them.
About the Author
Steve Brouwer is the author of Robbing Us Blind: The Return of the Bush Gang; Sharing the Pie: A Citizens Guide to Wealth and Power in the United States; Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (co-authored with Susan D. Rose); and Conquest and Capitalism, 1492-1992. He is also a carpenter and designer, and has organized worker-owned construction businesses and housing cooperatives. In 2007-2008, he lived in a rural village in the mountains of Venezuela and wrote about his campesino neighbors and the Bolivarian Revolution.