Authors
C Ray Borck
Publication date
2024/5
Source
Contemporary Sociology
Volume
53
Issue
3
Pages
250-252
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
This is Our School! Race and Community Resistance to School Reform, by Hava Rachel Gordon, is a multi-sited qualitative study of the complex relationship between urban school reform and community movements, based in Denver, Colorado. Gordon uses ethnography, interviews, critical participatory action research (CPAR), and focus groups to argue that the educational justice movement is shaped in myriad ways by intra-movement dynamics that are expressions of deeply entrenched race and class inequalities. Gordon’s research is impressively (and instructively) inductive. While conducting comparative ethnographic research on teen activists in Portland, Oregon and Oakland, California—resulting in Gordon’s (2009) book We Fight to Win: Inequalities and the Politics of Youth Activism—she found that education reform shapes young activists’ lives and organizing strategies. When she moved to start a job at the …