New Release Books by Annette Lareau

"Sociologist of education Annette Lareau is renowned in her field for her compassionate ethnographic work and the insightful ideas she''s able to draw from it. With Listening to People, she has given us an extremely practical guide to doing the kind of work she has been celebrated for. Lareau covers just about everything a social scientist needs to know--formulating a topic and honing it down to a good research question, obtaining IRB approval, finding a site and making introductions, conducting high-quality interviews and participant--observation, taking good notes and writing them up later, analyzing the data, and best of all, making clear how much the data analysis and the writing are part of the same process. Her tone throughout is about as straightforward as it gets, and she very generously shares stories of her own mistakes, missteps, and anxieties. Written for students and scholars in sociology, education, communications, social work, and possibly political science, anthropology, and related fields, the book will be an indispensable guide for graduate students and faculty in the social sciences (broadly conceived), and is even suitable for undergraduates"--

Learning how to carry out research projects using participant observation and in-depth interviews has become a priority for scholars in a wide range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, education, social work, nursing, and psychology. This book, a collection of well-known fieldwork accounts covering the qualitative research process, aims t

Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children''s hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children''s talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child''s development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America''s children. The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.

This new edition contextualizes Lareau''s original ethnography in a discussion of the most pressing issues facing educators at the beginning of the new millennium.

In education, it is necessary to look at students who are marginalized, and excluded, who is centered or privileged, and how, through academic discourse, silences are created, sustained, and legitimized. The three papers in this collection explore the politics of silencing and voice in education. "It''s More Covert Today'': The Importance of Race in Shaping Parents'' Views of the School" by Annette Lareau focuses on the ways in which certain types of parental culture and discourse are privileged in schools, leading to the construction of an "ideal type" of parental involvement. Parents who do not fit this construction are outside the bounds of what is acceptable for a parent, and their ideas, no matter how salient, are rebuffed. Lois Weis, in "White Male Working Class Youth: An Exploration of Relative Privilege and Loss," focuses on the ways in which white male working class identity is taking shape under the restructured economy of the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, ways in which young men are reaffirming the discourses of white male power and privilege in spite of an economy that increasingly denies them this privilege are examined. Michelle Fine, in "The ''Public'' in Public Schools: The Social Construction/Constriction of Moral Communities," examines a third set of issues related to silencing, the ways in which public schools, supposed to be universally accessible moral communities, engage in patterns of systematic exclusion and yet justify these patterns as being for the common good. (SLD)