Wendy Luttrell in Conversation with Asilia Franklin-Phipps, Cindi Katz, and Lauren Silver

Urban educational research, practice, and policy is preoccupied with problems, brokenness, stigma, and blame. As a result, too many people are unable to recognize the capacities and desires of children and youth growing up in working-class communities. This book offers an alternative angle of vision—animated by young people’s own photographs, videos, and perspectives over time. It shows how a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse community of young people in Worcester, MA used cameras at different ages (10, 12, 16 and 18) to capture and value the centrality of care in their lives, homes, and classrooms. Luttrell’s immersive, creative, and layered analysis of the young people’s images and narratives boldly refutes biased assumptions about working-class childhoods and re-envisions schools as inclusive, imaginative, and careful spaces. With an accompanying website featuring additional digital resources (http://www.childrenframingchildhoods.com/), this book challenges us to see differently and, thus, set our sights on a better future.

Wendy Luttrell is Professor of Urban Education, Sociology, Critical Social Psychology and Women and Gender Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research on educational inequality examines the interplay of social structure and subjective experience in school settings, focusing on how a sense of belonging, exclusion, entitlement, constraint, possibility, success and failure take root in young people’s self-evaluations and actions. She is the author of two award-winning books on this topic, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (1997) and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (2003) and is also the editor of Qualitative Educational Research: Readings on Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice (2010). Her recent book, Children Framing Childhoods: Working-class Kids’ Visions of Care (Policy Press, 2020) examines the role that gender, race, and immigrant status play in how diverse, young people growing up in urban, working-class communities portray their lives through photographs and video. At a time when distorted and increasingly fractious visions of “marginalized” communities proliferate, the book and its multimodal platform of photographs and videos (www.childrenframingchildhoods.com) compels readers/viewers to reconsider their ways of seeing and valuing poor and working-class children of color, their childhoods and implications for educational justice. Throughout her career, Luttrell has directed community-based, university, and teacher inquiry projects dedicated to advancing social justice in and around schools and that promote innovative research and teaching practices, as well as curriculum development initiatives. She also serves as Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education. To learn more about Wendy Luttrell and her works visit her website, www.wendyluttrell.org.

Asilia Franklin-Phipps is the Postdoctoral Fellow at the Teaching and Learning Center at The Graduate Center and teaches Education Studies courses at Brooklyn College. Asilia received her Ph.D. in Critical Sociocultural Studies in Education from the University of Oregon where she taught Education Foundations courses focused on culture, identity, media, and curriculum. Asilia also taught in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Oregon. Asilia is a former high school and community college English instructor and received her M.A. in Teaching of English and Ed.M in English Education from Teachers College. Asilia is currently thinking about the potential of art, film, digital media, and popular culture in teaching and learning about race and racism.

Cindi Katz is Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and everyday life, research on children’s geographies, her intervention on “minor theory”, and the notion of counter-topography, which is a means of recognizing the historical and geographical specificities of particular places while inferring their analytic connections to specific material social practices.

Lauren J. Silver is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies and the Faculty Director of Engaged Scholarship & Learning at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. She is a feminist ethnographer whose scholarship centers on the lives of young people who experience structural violence through poverty and social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality; it is deeply connected to the urban places where she lives and works.











When: Tue., Oct. 20, 2020 at 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Where: Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave.
212-817-7000
Price: Free
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Urban educational research, practice, and policy is preoccupied with problems, brokenness, stigma, and blame. As a result, too many people are unable to recognize the capacities and desires of children and youth growing up in working-class communities. This book offers an alternative angle of vision—animated by young people’s own photographs, videos, and perspectives over time. It shows how a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse community of young people in Worcester, MA used cameras at different ages (10, 12, 16 and 18) to capture and value the centrality of care in their lives, homes, and classrooms. Luttrell’s immersive, creative, and layered analysis of the young people’s images and narratives boldly refutes biased assumptions about working-class childhoods and re-envisions schools as inclusive, imaginative, and careful spaces. With an accompanying website featuring additional digital resources (http://www.childrenframingchildhoods.com/), this book challenges us to see differently and, thus, set our sights on a better future.

Wendy Luttrell is Professor of Urban Education, Sociology, Critical Social Psychology and Women and Gender Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research on educational inequality examines the interplay of social structure and subjective experience in school settings, focusing on how a sense of belonging, exclusion, entitlement, constraint, possibility, success and failure take root in young people’s self-evaluations and actions. She is the author of two award-winning books on this topic, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (1997) and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (2003) and is also the editor of Qualitative Educational Research: Readings on Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice (2010). Her recent book, Children Framing Childhoods: Working-class Kids’ Visions of Care (Policy Press, 2020) examines the role that gender, race, and immigrant status play in how diverse, young people growing up in urban, working-class communities portray their lives through photographs and video. At a time when distorted and increasingly fractious visions of “marginalized” communities proliferate, the book and its multimodal platform of photographs and videos (www.childrenframingchildhoods.com) compels readers/viewers to reconsider their ways of seeing and valuing poor and working-class children of color, their childhoods and implications for educational justice. Throughout her career, Luttrell has directed community-based, university, and teacher inquiry projects dedicated to advancing social justice in and around schools and that promote innovative research and teaching practices, as well as curriculum development initiatives. She also serves as Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education. To learn more about Wendy Luttrell and her works visit her website, www.wendyluttrell.org.

Asilia Franklin-Phipps is the Postdoctoral Fellow at the Teaching and Learning Center at The Graduate Center and teaches Education Studies courses at Brooklyn College. Asilia received her Ph.D. in Critical Sociocultural Studies in Education from the University of Oregon where she taught Education Foundations courses focused on culture, identity, media, and curriculum. Asilia also taught in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Oregon. Asilia is a former high school and community college English instructor and received her M.A. in Teaching of English and Ed.M in English Education from Teachers College. Asilia is currently thinking about the potential of art, film, digital media, and popular culture in teaching and learning about race and racism.

Cindi Katz is Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and everyday life, research on children’s geographies, her intervention on “minor theory”, and the notion of counter-topography, which is a means of recognizing the historical and geographical specificities of particular places while inferring their analytic connections to specific material social practices.

Lauren J. Silver is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies and the Faculty Director of Engaged Scholarship & Learning at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. She is a feminist ethnographer whose scholarship centers on the lives of young people who experience structural violence through poverty and social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality; it is deeply connected to the urban places where she lives and works.

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