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Learning to Labor in New Times foregrounds nine essays which re-examine the work of noted sociologist Paul Willis, 25 years after the publication of his seminal Learning to Labor, one of the most frequently cited and assigned texts in the cultural studies and social foundations of education.
A landmark work in sociology, cultural studies, and ethnography since its publication in 1977, Paul Willis's Learning to Labor is a provocative and troubling account of how education links culture and class in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Willis observed a working-class friendship group in an English industrial town in the West Midlands in their final years at school. These "lads" rebelled against the rules and values of the school, creating their own culture of opposition. Yet this resistance to official norms, Willis argues, prepared these students for working-class employment. Rebelling against authority made the lads experience the constraints that held them in subordinate class positions as choices of their own volition. Learning to Labor demonstrates the pervasiveness of class in lived experience. Its detailed and sympathetic ethnography emphasizes subjectivity and the role of working-class people in making their culture. Willis shows how resistance does not simply challenge the social order, but also constitutes it. The lessons of Learning to Labor apply as much to the United States as to the United Kingdom, especially the finding that education, rather than helping overcome hierarchies, can often perpetuate them, which is of renewed relevance at a time when education is trumpeted as meritocratic and a panacea for inequality.
In the three decades after 1885, a virtual explosion in the nation's print media—newspaper tabloids, inexpensive magazines, and best-selling books—vaulted the American writer to unprecedented heights of cultural and political influence. The Labor of Words traces the impact of this mass literary marketplace on Progressive era writers. Using the works and careers of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips, and Lincoln Steffens as case studies, Christopher P. Wilson measures the advantages and costs of the new professional literary role and captures the drama of this transformative epoch in American journalism and letters.
"A timely, intensely intimate, and relevant exposé." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The Pulitzer Prize finalist's powerful examination of the hidden stories of workers overlooked by #MeToo Apple orchards in bucolic Washington State. Office parks in Southern California under cover of night. The home of an elderly man in Miami. These are some of the workplaces where women have suffered brutal sexual assaults and shocking harassment at the hands of their employers, often with little or no official recourse. In this heartrending but ultimately inspiring tale, investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Bernice Yeung exposes the epidemic of sexual violence levied against the low-wage workers largely overlooked by #MeToo, and charts their quest for justice. In a Day's Work reveals the underbelly of hidden economies teeming with employers who are in the practice of taking advantage of immigrant women. But it also tells a timely story of resistance, introducing a group of courageous allies who challenge the status quo of violations alongside aggrieved workers—and win.
The fear and pain most women expect from pregnancy can at last be overcome. Carl Jones, a certified childbirth educator, tells how using mental imagery can help you reduce the pain of labor by controlling the fear beforehand. His easy-to-follow, eight-step method, which teaches your mind to cooperate with your body, will help make your childbirth less stressful and more natural. Whether you plan to give birth at home, in a childbearing center, or in a hospital, Carl Jones's simple exercises will put you in touch with the best instrument of birth there is—yourself.
“A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century. Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead. A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick
Prologue -- The trailblazers -- The garment workers -- The mill workers -- The revolutionaries -- The miners -- The harvesters -- The cleaners -- The freedom fighters -- The movers -- The metalworkers -- The disabled workers -- The sex workers -- The prisoners -- Epilogue.
In the second edition of Labor-Based Grading Contracts, Asao B. Inoue refines his exploration of labor-based grading contracts in the writing classroom. Drawing on antiracist teaching practices, he argues that labor-based grading contracts offer a compassionate approach that is strongly grounded in social justice work. Updated with a new foreword and revised chapters, the book offers a meditation on how Inoue's use of Freirean problem-posing led him to experiment with grading contracts. The result is a robust Marxian theory of labor that considers Hannah Arendt's theory of labor-work-action and Barbara Adam's concept of "timescapes." The heart of the book details the theoretical and practical ways labor-based grading contracts can be used and assessed for effectiveness in classrooms and programs. Inoue concludes his exploration of labor-based grading by moving outside the classroom, considering how assessing writing in the socially just ways he offers in the book may provide a way to address the violence and discord seen in the world today.
