This article provides an analysis of Asian American gang violence within the context of racialization and the legacy of imperialism. The analysis is grounded in a specific study of the Van Nuys (CA) Asian Boys gang and the particularities of Asian American gang violence in Southern California during the 1990s. Drawing from historical writings on…

Transnational students and families are those who cross real and metaphoric borders, spanning countries, to engage family and community in meaningful ways. Based on a three-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, I show the distinct ways of knowing of four Mexican-origin, working class families and how the U.S. schools where the children from these…

Primarily drawing from the Mestiz@ Theory of Intelligences (Carrillo, 2013), this article examines how working class Latino male college students in North Carolina navigate multiple cultural worlds and excel academically. This work addresses current gaps in the literature that largely fail to unpack the experiences of academically successful…

This article draws upon five different empirical studies to examine how critical dialogue can be fostered across educational settings and with diverse populations: middle-school students discussing immigration picture books, a teacher study group exploring texts on homelessness, a teacher education class studying critical literacy, working class…

This article investigates the role of autoethnographic research as the methodological tool of choice for a Chicana who positions herself along the liminal perspective. I posit that "testimonios", autobiographical educational experiences, must be used as valid ethnographic research to contribute to existing knowledge around issues of…

This article considers the possibilities for fostering critical consciousness (awareness and understanding of oppression) among American working-class students in the face of their often severe educational alienation. After noting the failure of existing critical pedagogical literature to address this problem adequately, it establishes the…

In this article, I argue for a closer read of the daily "class work" of teachers, as posited by Reay, 1998. In developing exploratory class portraits of four teachers who occupy distinctive social positions (two from working-class homes now teaching upper-middle-class children and two from upper-middle-class homes now teaching poor children), I…

When they graduate I want them to feel, "I went through a real thing, not an approximation of college, but I went through college and that means something!" (Adjunct Instructor) This article explores the complexity of providing an academically rigorous college education to adult students enrolled in a union-supported worker education program…

Public higher education has undergone a process similar to that in the national polity: a one-sided struggle by those with power to shape the institution to be more market driven, more focused on what will generate (non-state) revenues, more dominated by top administrators, and less concerned about the working class and people of color. This…

This qualitative study offers an interpretation of the reported experiences of three working-class women of color who had just completed their student teaching placements in fulfillment of requirements for their Bachelor of Science degrees in Early Childhood Education. These working-class women's perspectives, traditionally underrepresented in the…