Contact Zones: California Public Schools and Encounters Across Lines of Racialized Ethnicity, Gender, and Social Class

CONTACT ZONES: CALIFORNIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND ENCOUNTERS ACROSS LINES OF RACIALIZED ETHNICITY, GENDER, AND SOCIAL CLASS

The Relatively Hidden, but Tectonic, Dynamics of Social Class in the Experiences of Elementary School Children in California
Prof. Barrie Thorne, Sociology, Gender & Women's Studies

Over the last four decades the contours of childhood in urban California have been marked by widening gaps between rich and poor, the depletion of state provisioning for families, the spread of private markets, and a dramatic influx of immigrants from diverse places of origin.   Extensive social class divides have left lower-income children to do the work of democracy in the “contact zones” of racial-ethnically diverse public schools.  Collaborative fieldwork in a public elementary school in Oakland provided insight into the ways in which students negotiated differences and inequalities.  Ideas about race, culture, and language, and images from popular culture, figured prominently in their constructions of individual and group difference.   Social class positioning was far less coded and visible, and more marked by shame and “shamework.”  Although class divides are tectonic in their effects, in children’s daily experiences, they are relatively hidden from view.

Negotiating "Otherness": Exploring the Contact Zone of University-Community Partnerships in an Urban Context
Emily Gleason, Education

This presentation reflects a portion of a larger qualitative study of two models of university-community collaborations.  Each collaboration created “contact zones” between undergraduates from a prestigious urban university and local high school youth from the surrounding inner city environs.  The research explores the engagement between young people from disparate social and cultural backgrounds, with an eye on how they make sense of each other, their own identities, and their “place” in the world.  Magnifying tensions around racial, class, ethnic, geographic, and cultural differences, these partnerships produce spaces in which relations of power are negotiated and contested.  This presentation focuses on one of the study’s larger questions: How do youth and university students theorize about “Others” and “Otherness” through the course of program involvement, and how are constructs of “difference” negotiated in the “contact zone”?