The Unknown City

by FINE, MICHELLE

• ISBN13: 9780807041130
• ISBN10: 0807041130
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-02-18
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

The young people defined as "Gen Xers" in the media and popular imagination almost never include poor or working-class young adults. These young people - a huge and important part of our society - are misrepresented and silent in our national conversation. InThe Unknown City, Michelle Fine and Lois Weis offer a groundbreaking, theoretically sophisticated ethnography of the lives of young adults (ages 23 to 35), based on hundreds of interviews. We discover their views on everything from the construction of "whiteness" and affirmative action to the economy, education, and new public spaces of community hope. Finally, Fine and Weis point to what is being done and what should be done in terms of national policy to improve the future of these remarkable women and men.

Author Biography

Michelle Fine is professor of social psychology at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York and lives in Montclair, New Jersey. She is author of several books, including Framing Dropouts, coauthor with Lani Guinier and Jane Balin of Becoming Gentlemen, and coeditor with Lois Weis of the major new anthology Off White. Lois Weis is professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and lives in Buffalo, New York. She is also author of Working Class Without Work, among others.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Voices of Hope and Despair: Introduction	p. 1
Narrating the 1980s and 1990s: Voices of White and African American Men	p. 16
Loss of Privilege inside White, Working-Class Masculinity	p. 39
"To Stand Up and Be Men": Black Males Rewriting Social Representations	p. 59
"It's a Small Frog That Will Never Leave Puerto Rico": Puerto Rican Men and the Struggle for Place in the United States	p. 84
Cops, Crime, and Violence	p. 108
"I've Slept in Clothes Long Enough": Domestic Violence among Women in the White Working Class	p. 133
"Food in Our Stomachs and a Roof Overhead": African American Women Crossing Borders	p. 161
Working Without a Net: Poor Mothers Raising Their Families	p. 186
Refusing the Betrayal: Latinas Redefining Gender, Sexuality, Family, and Home	p. 206
"You Can Never Get Too Much": Reflections on Urban Schooling ... for Grown-Ups and Kids	p. 228
Work, the State, and the Body: Re-viewing the Loss and Re-imagining the Future	p. 251
Epilogue: Writing the "Wrongs" of Fieldwork: Confronting Our Own Research/Writing Dilemmas in Urban Ethnographics	p. 264
Appendix 1	p. 289
Appendix 2	p. 292
Appendix 3	p. 298
Notes	p. 305
References	p. 314
Index	p. 329
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