Diversity & Inclusion Resources

Lee shows how class differences are enacted and negotiated by students, faculty, and administrators at an elite liberal arts college. Using material from two years of fieldwork and more than 140 interviews with students, faculty, administrators, and alumnae at the pseudonymous Linden College, Lee adds depth to our understanding of inequality in higher education. Using students' own descriptions of their experiences, Lee shows how the lived experience of socioeconomic difference is often defined in moral, as well as economic, terms. Tensions, often unspoken, undermine students' senses of belonging.

Ranita Ray uncovers the pernicious consequences of focusing on risk behaviors such as drug use, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood as the key to ameliorating poverty. Hunger, homelessness, untreated illnesses, and long hours spent traveling between work, school, and home disrupted their dreams of upward mobility. While families, schools, nonprofit organizations, academics, and policy makers stress risk behaviors in their efforts to end the cycle of poverty, Ray argues that this strategy reinforces class and racial hierarchies and diverts resources that could better support marginalized youth's efforts to reach their educational and occupational goals.

Informed by labor struggles of the past as well as contemporary social justice struggles, working-class women expanded the vision and reach of antipoverty programs as their activism continued into the 1970s and 1980s. They led a regional welfare rights movement that organized women's health groups, protested the harsh environmental and labor policies of the coal industry, joined union picket lines, started community health clinics, and fought for access to jobs previously closed to women. Wilkerson examines the intersections of gender, race, class, social movements, and public policy in the Appalachian South.

"Economic and political forces no longer combat poverty--they generate poverty!" exclaim William Goldsmith and Edward Blakely in their report on the plight of American's urban poor. In this revised and updated edition of their 1992 book, the authors present a compelling examination of the damaging divisions that isolate poor city minority residents.

In this comprehensive study of a century of socialism, the author traces the fortunes of the political parties of the Left in Western Europe. From the rise of the Bolsheviks to the fall of the Berlin wall, from the Second International to the birth of the welfare state, from the working class militancy and student uprisings of the 1960s, through the revival of feminism and the arrival of "green" politics, to the reluctant embrace of market economics en route to the millennium. Sassoon shows that throughout their history the fortunes of socialism and capitalism have been inextricably linked.

Again and again, Americans have asked why the most fragile borrowers face the highest costs for access to the smallest loans. To protect low-wage workers in need of credit, reformers have repeatedly turned to law, only to face the vexing question of where to draw the line between necessary protection and overreaching paternalism. City of Debtors shows how each generation of Americans has tackled the problem of fringe finance, using law to redefine the meaning of justice within capitalism for those on the economic margins.

Fifty-seven million Americans, including 21 percent of the nation's children, live a notch above the poverty line, and yet the challenges they face are largely ignored. Missing Class parents often work at a breakneck pace to preserve the progress they have made and are but one divorce or unexpected hospitalization away from sliding into poverty. The Missing Class is an urgent and timely exploration that describes-through the experiences of nine families-the unique problems faced by this growing class of people who are neither working poor nor middle class.