Routledge Class Reunion: The Remaking of the American White Working Class (Critical Social Thought)

Product Description Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of "Freeway" in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy. Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future. Review "Lois Weis captures the complexities and contradictions of life in white working-class families at the turn of the 21st century. In a richly theorized but highly readable text, she illuminates how raced, classed, and gendered identities are shaped by changes in the U.S. political economy. An important book!" -- Jean Anyon, author of Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban School Reform " Class Reunion vividly illustrates how class is lived and identity is shaped within a context of globalization and neoliberalism. Lois Weis offers significant insights into the importance of class at a time when so much work is diminishing its relevance to contemporary understandings of the present social and political conjuncture." -- Valerie Walkerdine, author of Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class About the Author Lois Weis is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of several books including The Unknown City, Beyond Black and White , Off White and Working Class without Work.