This volume sheds light on how to construe the contemporary political vicissitudes of the Black experience and the ongoing struggle for agency, belonging, and civil rights. It offers a fresh look at familiar concepts such as activism and belonging and models innovative approaches for studying the African diasporic experience in the 21st century.

The story of activist youth in America is usually framed around the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and college campuses, focusing primarily on college students in the 1960s and 1970s. But a remarkably effective tradition of Black high school student activism in the civil rights era has gone understudied. In 1951, students at R. R. Moton High School in rural Virginia led a student walkout and contacted the law firm of Hill, Martin, and Robinson in Richmond, Virginia, to file one of the five pivotal court cases that comprised the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, twenty-four Burke High School students in Charleston, South Carolina, organized the first direct action, nonviolent protest in the city at the downtown S. H. Kress department store. Months later in the small town of McComb, Mississippi, an entire high school walked out in protest of the conviction of a student who sat-in on a local Woolworth lunch counter in 1961, guiding the agenda for the historic Freedom Summer campaign of 1964. A New Kind of Youth brings high school activism into greater focus, illustrating how Black youth supported liberatory social and political movements and inspired their elders across the South.

Teacher attrition is endemic in education, creating teacher quantity and quality gaps across schools that are often stratified by region and racialized nuance (Cowan et al., 2016; Scafidi et al., 2017). This reality is starkly reflected in South Carolina. Not too long ago, on May 1, 2019, a sea of approximately 10,000 people, dressed in red, convened at the state capital in downtown Columbia, SC (Bowers, 2019b). This statewide teacher walkout was assembled to call for the improvement of teachers' working conditions and the learning conditions of their students. The gathering was the largest display of teacher activism in the history of South Carolina and reflected a trend in a larger wave of teacher walkouts that have rippled across the nation over the last five years. The crowd comprised teachers from across South Carolina, who walked out of their classrooms for the gathering, as well as numerous students, parents, university faculty, and other community members that rallied with teachers in solidarity. Undergirding this walkout and others that took hold across the country is a perennial and pervasive pattern of unfavorable teacher working conditions that have contributed to what some are calling a teacher shortage “crisis” (Chuck, 2019). We have focused our work specifically on the illustrative case of South Carolina, given the extreme teacher staffing challenges the state is facing. Across numerous metrics, the South Carolina teacher shortage has reached critical levels, influenced by teacher recruitment and retention challenges. For instance, the number of teacher education program completers has declined annually, dropping from 2,060 in 2014-15 to 1,642 in the 2018-19 school year. Meanwhile, the number of teachers leaving the teaching field has increased from 4,108.1 to 5,341.3 across that same period (CERRA, 2019). These trends are likely to continue as COVID-19 has put additional pressure on the already fragile teacher labor market. Some of the hardest-to-staff districts are often located in communities with the highest diversity and poverty. To prosper and progress, reformers and public stakeholders must have a vested interest in maintaining full classrooms and strengthening the teaching workforce. An important element of progress towards tackling these longstanding challenges is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the problem. While teacher shortages are occurring nationwide (Garcia & Weiss, 2019), how they manifest regionally is directly influenced by its localized historical context and the evolution of the teaching profession's reputation within a state. Thus, the impetus of this book is to use South Carolina as an illustrative example to discuss the context and evolution that has shaped the status of the teaching profession that has led to a boiling point of mass teacher shortages and the rise of historic teacher walkouts.

This cutting-edge new book is the replacement for Folklife and Museums: Selected Readings which was published nearly thirty years ago in 1987. The editors of that volume, Patricia Hall and Charlie Seemann, are now joined by C. Kurt Dewhurst as a third editor, for this book which includes updates to the still-relevant and classic essays and articles from the earlier text and features new pioneering pieces by some of today’s most outstanding scholars and practitioners, to provide a more current overview of the field and addressing contemporary issues. Folklife and Museums: Twenty-First Century Perspectives is a brand new collection of cutting-edge essays that combine theoretical insights, practical applications, topical case studies (focusing on particular subject matter areas and specific cultural groups), accompanied by up-to-date “resources” and “suggested readings” sections. Each essay is preceded by an explanatory headnote contextualizing the essay and includes illustrative photographs.

The Complex Web of Inequality in North American Schools analyzes and challenges the critical gaps and inequalities that persist in the American school system. Showing how historical biases have been inherited in current polices relating to non-dominant youth, the text calls for educational reforms that perform in the name of social justice. This edited collection carefully interrogates how technocratic educational policies and reforms are often unequipped to address the interplay of political, social, economic, ideological factors that are at the roots of educational injustice. Considering the most vulnerable student populations, original case studies explore how inadequate structures, practices, and beliefs have increased marginalization, and highlight those instances in which policy has proved effective in reducing opportunity gaps between economically rich and poor students; between white, Asian, Black and Latino youth; between native English speakers and second language learners; highlighting racial integration and unequal American Indian education; and for students with special educational needs. The insights into such policies shed light on the complex web of historically embedded inequities that continue to shape the construction, roll-out, and consequences of education policy for the most marginalized youth populations today. This volume will be of interest to graduate, and postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of education policy, sociology of education, economics of education, and history of education, and well as policy evaluation.

Wie gelingt es, die noch heute anhaltenden Folgen von Kolonisierung und Versklavung theoretisch und methodisch umfassend zu begreifen? Der Band unternimmt eine Bestandsaufnahme von Positionen der Postkolonialen, Dekolonialen und der Black Studies. Dabei werden zum einen die unterschiedlichen epistemischen Voraussetzungen, methodischen Zugänge und historischen wie disziplinären Entwicklungen nachgezeichnet. Zum anderen zeigen sich die konzeptionellen Überschneidungen der unterschiedlichen sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlichen Positionen.

Hinting at Rimbaud’s provocative dictum that “I is an other,” this anthology discusses a wide-ranging array of twentieth-century and contemporary minority American modes of life writing, prompted by the following questions: Who (else) hides behind this “I” that the author-narrator-character “contractually” claims to be? What generic, aesthetic, political and socio-cultural issues are at stake in a conception of the self as other? The essays analyze autobiographical works from major Native American writers (John Milton Oskison and Louise Erdrich), an African American music-hall artist (Josephine Baker) and writers (John Edgar Wideman and Ta-Nehisi Coates), Caribbean American writers (Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat), and Asian American writers (Ruth Ozeki, Cathy Park Hong, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Loung Ung). They shed light on autobiography as a collaborative writing and reading practice, rather than as a self-oriented genre, probing the “relational” dimension of life writing. Building on the feminist theorization of relationality and the political and aesthetic power of relational bonds, they put forward the necessarily intersubjective dynamics of minority American “self-conceptions” which originate in the writers’ experiences of otherness. The articles highlight that the relational ethnic self characteristically inhabits the liminal spaces where modes of life writing overlap and can thrive in dialogical intertextual readings. They foreground the subversive, cathartic, and memorializing potential of minority American modes of “other-writing” whose ontological dimension is manifest in the writers’ quest for a sense of repossession and agency, beyond communal boundaries. Contributing to the up-to-date critical discussion on relationality, not as a genre, but rather as a reading and “a storytelling practice,” they examine the ways it participates in a global, transcultural approach to ethno-racial issues in the United States.