Education

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar

This volume contains seventy-five interviews with Fordham administrators, faculty, and staff who share their rememberances of the University. The occasion for the project is Fordham's Sesquientennial celebration as the University completes its one-hundred and fiftieth year and the excerpts range from Fordham's earlier days to current events. Collectively, this book is an informal history of Fordham and its people, both as a community which is vital and growing, and a university whose past is rich in tradition. In a "Message from the President," Rev. Joseph A. O'Hare, S.J. summarizes the importance of the project in this way, "A university, like any great institution, transcends the experience of any single generation. At the same time, the people who make up the university shape the meaning of its tradition and give it heart and voice.

Through this Oral History Project, many of the men and women who played important roles in Fordham's history express their own memories of the University. Each adds a special angle of vision on the many-sided life of Fordham. Their words, captured in living testimony and recorded in these excerpts, keep the sense of Fordham's past alive and help us translate that past into a promise for the future."

For readers associated with the Fordham Community this volume captures this one-time event in a unique way. To any reader it offers an entertaining, insiders view of history of the Jesuit University of New York.

Father L. (who was under five foot tall) was hiking with students in the High Bridge section when a great gawk of a country man exclaimed: 'Gosh! Look at Tom Thumb!' A student named Ted, fearing no one and thinking the priest insulted, leaped over the fence and knocked the country man senseless with one blow of his fist. Father's gentle words to both parties reestablished peace.

Father B. impressed us as one who had faithfully devoted the energies of a wonderful intellect to the solution of the great problems of life. He had studied harder, looked deeper, seen better and clearer than we could ever hope to do into the vexed questions, the mysteries and the doubts that assail us. And, after all his study, he deliberately became a saint.

—reminiscences of a Forty-Niner—

Repulsed from many a door in my search for food and work, I wandered on with my gripsack until toward noon I reached Fordham College, famished and footsore. I'd eaten nothing since the previous day. The college gates were open. I strolled wearily in without aim or purpose. An old Father, whose noble face I sometimes recall in my dreams, came over and asked kindly if I was hungry. I was fearfully so and said as much, although I did not mean to. I never saw a real live monk before. My Lutheran training did not exactly incline me in their favor. I ate, not without a secret suspicion I'd next be asked to abjure my faith—do homage to the Virgin Mary—which I firmly resolved not to do. The meal over, I was sent on my way with enough to do me for supper. I felt heartily ashamed of myself. I'm just as good a Protestant as I ever was, but I have no quarrel with the excellent charities of the Roman Church or with their noble spirit and management. I learned that lesson at Fordham, thirty years ago.

—Jacob Riis—

Based largely on archival sources in the United States and Rome, this book documents the evolution of Fordham from a small diocesan college into a major American Jesuit and Catholic university. It places the development of Fordham within the context of the massive expansion of Catholic higher education that took
place in the United States in the twentieth century. This was reflected at Fordham in its transformation from a local commuter college to a predominantly residential institution that now attracts students from 48 states and 65 foreign countries to its three undergraduate schools and seven graduate and professional schools with an enrollment of more than 15,000 students.

This is honest history that gives due credit to Fordham for its many academic achievements, but it also recognizes that Fordham shared the shortcomings of many Catholic colleges in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was an ongoing struggle between Jesuit faculty who wished to adhere closely to the traditional Jesuit ratio studiorum and those who recognized the need for Fordham to modernize its curriculum to meet the demands of the regional accrediting agencies.

In recent decades, like virtually all American Catholic universities and colleges, the ownership of Fordham has been transferred from the Society of Jesus to a predominantly lay board of trustees. At the same time, the sharp decline in the number of Jesuit administrators and faculty has intensified the challenge of offering
a first-rate education while maintaining Fordham’s Catholic and Jesuit identity.

June 2016 is the 175th anniversary of the founding of Fordham University, and this comprehensive history of a beloved and renowned New York City institution of higher learning will help contribute to celebrating this momentous occasion.

Teaching should never be color-blind. In a world where many believe the best approach toward eradicating racism is to feign ignorance of our palpable physical differences, a few have led the movement toward convincing fellow educators not only to consider race but to use it as the very basis of their teaching. This is what education activist and writer Pamela Lewis has set upon to do in her compelling book, Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City. As the title suggests, embracing blackness in the classroom can be threatening to many and thus challenging to carry out in the present school system.

Unapologetic and gritty, Teaching While Black offers an insightful, honest portrayal of Lewis’s turbulent eleven-year relationship within the New York City public school system and her fight to survive in a profession that has undervalued her worth and her understanding of how children of color learn best. Tracing her educational journey with its roots in the North Bronx, Lewis paints a vivid, intimate picture of her battle to be heard in a system struggling to unlock the minds of the children it serves, while stifling the voices of teachers of color who hold the key. The reader gains full access to a perspective that has been virtually ignored since the No Child Left Behind Act, through which questions surrounding increased resignation rates by teachers of color and failing test scores can be answered.

Teaching While Black is both a deeply personal narrative of a black woman’s real-life experiences and a clarion call for culturally responsive teaching. Lewis fearlessly addresses the reality of toxic school culture head-on and gives readers an inside look at the inert bureaucracy, heavy-handed administrators, and ineffective approach to pedagogy that prevent inner-city kids from learning. At the heart of Lewis’s moving narrative is her passion. Each chapter delves deeper into the author’s conscious uncoupling from the current trends in public education that diminish proven remedies for academic underachievement, as observed from her own experiences as a teacher of students of color.

Teaching While Black summons everyone to re-examine what good teaching looks like. Through a powerful vision, together with practical ideas and strategies for teachers navigating very difficult waters, Lewis delivers hope for the future of teaching and learning in inner-city schools.

The academy is often described as an ivory tower, isolated from the community surrounding it. Presenting the theory, vision, and implementation of a socially engaged program for the Department of Human and Organizational Development (HOD) in Peabody’s College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, Academics in Action! describes a more integrated model wherein students and faculty work with communities, learn from them, and bring to bear findings from theory and research to generate solutions to community problems.

Offering examples of community-engaged theory, scholarship, teaching, and action, Academics in Action! describes the nuanced structures that foster and support their development within a research university. Theory and action span multiple ecological levels from individuals and small groups to organizations and social structures. The communities of engagement range from local neighborhoods and schools to arenas of national policy and international development.

Reflecting the unique perspectives of research faculty, practitioners, and graduate students, Academics in Action! documents a specific philosophy of education that fosters and supports engagement; the potentially transformative nature of academic work for students, faculty, and the broader society; and some of the implications and challenges of action-oriented efforts in light of dynamics such as income inequality, racism, and global capitalism. This edited volume chronicles teaching, research, and community action that influences both inside and outside the classroom as well as presents dimensions of a participatory model that set such efforts into action.

Teaching should never be color-blind. In her compelling and unapologetic memoir, Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City, teacher and writer Pamela Lewis urges her fellow educators not only to acknowledge race but to consider both the traumatic and healing impact that curriculum, pedagogical practice, and social interaction can have on students and colleagues of color. Chronicling the vast spectrum of emotions felt by Black and Brown students and teachers within school walls, Lewis explains, as her title suggests, that teaching—and learning—while Black can be an equally harrowing and awe-inspiring experience.

Hard-hitting and eloquently written, Teaching While Black offers an insightful, honest portrayal of Lewis’s fight to survive in a profession that has undervalued her worth and her understanding of the kind of education and connection urban children of color need to succeed. The reader gains full access to a perspective that has been virtually ignored since the integration of schools, through which questions surrounding increased resignation rates by teachers of color and failing test scores can be answered.

Teaching While Black is both a deeply personal narrative about a Black woman’s struggle to be heard and a clarion call for cultural responsiveness and teacher accountability. In this must-read account, Lewis summons every teacher of all races to re-examine their teaching methods and agendas and to remember who it is that they serve.

The academy is often described as an ivory tower, isolated from the community surrounding it. Presenting the theory, vision, and implementation of a socially engaged program for the Department of Human and Organizational Development (HOD) in Peabody’s College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, Academics in Action! describes a more integrated model wherein students and faculty work with communities, learn from them, and bring to bear findings from theory and research to generate solutions to community problems.

Offering examples of community-engaged theory, scholarship, teaching, and action, Academics in Action! describes the nuanced structures that foster and support their development within a research university. Theory and action span multiple ecological levels from individuals and small groups to organizations and social structures. The communities of engagement range from local neighborhoods and schools to arenas of national policy and international development.

Reflecting the unique perspectives of research faculty, practitioners, and graduate students, Academics in Action! documents a specific philosophy of education that fosters and supports engagement; the potentially transformative nature of academic work for students, faculty, and the broader society; and some of the implications and challenges of action-oriented efforts in light of dynamics such as income inequality, racism, and global capitalism. This edited volume chronicles teaching, research, and community action that influences both inside and outside the classroom as well as presents dimensions of a participatory model that set such efforts into action.

“What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?” asked Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. “There is more and more reason to think: less and less,” he answered.

In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor.

Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter?

The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts —with the
humanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today’s market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.

Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other “crises,” Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education—the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s —that threaten the survival of professors as we’ve known them.

There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholars
an essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.

“What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?” asked Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. “There is more and more reason to think: less and less,” he answered.

In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor. With the rise of neoliberalism and the gig economy, the notion of the professoriate has become replaced in our consciousness with the notion of academic labor.

Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter?

The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts—with the humanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today’s market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.

Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other “crises,” Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education—the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s—that threaten the survival of professors as we’ve known them.

There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholars an essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.

First published in 2008, The Last Professors has largely had its arguments borne out in the interim, as the percentage of courses taught by tenured professors continues to dwindle. This new edition includes a substantial new Introduction that elaborates on recent developments and offers tough but productive analysis that will be crucial for today's academics to heed.

Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World is an insightful collection that articulates how Jesuit colleges and universities create an educational community energized to transform the lives of its students, faculty, and administrators and to equip them to transform a broken world. The essays are rooted in Pedro Arrupe’s ideal of forming men and women for others and inspired by Peter-Hans Kolvenbach’s October 2000 address at Santa Clara in which he identified three areas where the promotion of justice may be manifested in our institutions: formation and learning, research and teaching, and our way of proceeding.

Using the three areas laid out in Fr. Kolvenbach’s address as its organizing structure, this stimulating volume addresses the following challenges: How do we promote student life experiences and service? How does interdisciplinary collaborative research promote teaching and reflection? How do our institutions exemplify justice in their daily practices? Introductory pieces by internationally acclaimed authors such as Rev. Dean Brackley, S.J.; David J. O’Brien; Lisa Sowle Cahill; and Rev. Stephen A. Privett, S.J., pave the way for a range of smart and highly creative essays that illustrate and honor the scholarship, teaching, and service that have developed out of a commitment to the ideals of Jesuit higher education. The topics covered span disciplines and fields from the arts to engineering, from nursing to political science and law. The essays offer numerous examples of engaged pedagogy, which as Rev. Brackley points out fits squarely with Jesuit pedagogy: insertion programs, community-based learning, study abroad, internships, clinical placements, and other forms of interacting with the poor and with cultures other than our own. This book not only illustrates the dynamic growth of Jesuit education but critically identifies key challenges for educators, such as: How can we better address issues of race in our teaching and learning? Are we educating in nonviolence? How can we make the college or university “greener”? How can we evoke a desire for the faith that does justice?

Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World is an indispensable volume that has the potential to act as an academic facilitator for the promotion of justice within not only Jesuit schools but all schools of higher education.

Fordham University is the quintessential American-Catholic institution—and one now looked upon as among the best Catholic universities in the country. Its story is also the story of New York, especially the Bronx, and
Fordham’s commitment to the city during its rise, fall, and rebirth. It’s a story of Jesuits, soldiers, alumni who fought in World Wars, chaplains, teachers, and administrators who made bold moves and big mistakes, of
presidents who thought small and those who had vision. And of the first women, students and faculty, who helped bring Fordham into the 20th century. Finally it’s the story of an institution’s attempt to keep its Jesuit
and Catholic identity as it strives for leadership in a competitive world.

Combining authoritative history and fascinating anecdotes, Schroth offers an engaging account of Fordham’s one hundred thirrty-seven years—here, updated, revised, and expanded to cover the new presidency of Joseph M. McShane, S.J., and the challenges Fordham faces in the new century.

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” in New York City at the Riverside Church. At the time, the United States framed its intervention in Vietnam as a mechanism to protect democracy worldwide. While this supposed defense of democracy raged on thousands of miles away, social protests for racial equity, political representation, and an economic livelihood for its most disenfranchised communities spread across the United States. Highlighting this contradiction in his anti-war speech, King presented his doubts regarding the government’s ability to eliminate the materialism, militarism, and racism that built the nation, a plight that continues today. Written from the perspectives of education practitioners and scholars who have personal histories with global war via (settler) colonialism, immigration, and subsequent disenfranchisement in the United States, Education at War addresses the vestiges of war that shape the lives of youth of color.

This thought-provoking collection of essays reveals how the contemporary specter of war has become a central way that racism and materialism are manifested and practiced within education. Education at War asserts that the contemporary neoliberal characterization of education and school-based reform is situated within the global political economy that has facilitated growth in the prison and military industrial complex, and simultaneous divestment from education domestically. Essays examine anti-war projects across the K–20 education continuum with chapters from educators who are from and/or work directly with the communities often pathologized in “damage-centered” educational discourse. The authors do not just frame the conditions faced by our communities as state-mediated but also as collectively resisted.

They place war, surveillance, and carcerality at the center of critical race analysis in education. Each of the chapters include a pedagogical component, including lessons and comments for educators and youth workers. In cultivating this text, the editors have contributed to building a community of educators, activists, teachers, and scholars who collectively explore how resistance can produce the opportunity for rich, diverse, and transformative learning for marginalized students and communities.

Contributors: Suzie M. Abajian, Yousef K. Baker, Dolores Calderon, Edward R. Curammeng, Chandni Desai, Maryam S. Griffin, Heather L. Horsley, David Stovall, Clayton Pierce, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Sepehr Vakil, Shirin Vossoughi,, Connie Wun, Miguel Zavala

A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to “cool out” expectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization.

In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing.

Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a “cooling out” to a “heating up” of class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism.

The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from “beat the odds” of long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds.

Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.

A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to “cool out” expectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization.

In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing.

Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a “cooling out” to a “heating up” of class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism.

The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from “beat the odds” of long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds.

Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?

The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, "disposable populations" within a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art).

The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future.

This book provides a definitive account of Jacques Derrida's involvement in debates about the university. Derrida was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (GREPH), an activist group that mobilized opposition to the Giscard government's proposals to "rationalize" the French educational system in 1975. He also helped to convene the Estates General of Philosophy, a vast gathering in 1979 of educators from across France. Furthermore, he was closely associated with the founding of the International College of Philosophy in Paris, and his connection with the International Parliament of Writers during the 1990s also illustrates his continuing interest in the possibility of launching an array of literary and philosophical projects while experimenting with new kinds of institutions in which they might take their specific shape and direction.

Derrida argues that the place of philosophy in the university should be explored as both a historical question and a philosophical problem in its own right.

He argues that philosophy simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the university. In its founding role, it must come from "outside" the institution in which, nevertheless, it comes to define itself. The author asks whether this irresolvable tension between "belonging" and "not belonging" might not also form the basis of Derrida's political thinking and activism where wider issues of contemporary significance are concerned. Key questions today concerning citizenship, rights, the nation-state and Europe, asylum, immigration, terror, and the "return" of religion all involve assumptions and ideas about "belonging"; and they entail constitutional, legal, institutional and material constraints that take shape precisely on the basis of such ideas. This project will therefore open up a key question: Can deconstruction's insight into the paradoxical institutional standing of philosophy form the basis of a meaningful political response by "theory" to a number of contemporary international issues?

This book provides a definitive account of Jacques Derrida's involvement in debates about the university. Derrida was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (GREPH), an activist group that mobilized opposition to the Giscard government's proposals to "rationalize" the French educational system in 1975. He also helped to convene the Estates General of Philosophy, a vast gathering in 1979 of educators from across France. Furthermore, he was closely associated with the founding of the International College of Philosophy in Paris, and his connection with the International Parliament of Writers during the 1990s also illustrates his continuing interest in the possibility of launching an array of literary and philosophical projects while experimenting with new kinds of institutions in which they might take their specific shape and direction.

Derrida argues that the place of philosophy in the university should be explored as both a historical question and a philosophical problem in its own right.

He argues that philosophy simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the university. In its founding role, it must come from "outside" the institution in which, nevertheless, it comes to define itself. The author asks whether this irresolvable tension between "belonging" and "not belonging" might not also form the basis of Derrida's political thinking and activism where wider issues of contemporary significance are concerned. Key questions today concerning citizenship, rights, the nation-state and Europe, asylum, immigration, terror, and the "return" of religion all involve assumptions and ideas about "belonging"; and they entail constitutional, legal, institutional and material constraints that take shape precisely on the basis of such ideas. This project will therefore open up a key question: Can deconstruction's insight into the paradoxical institutional standing of philosophy form the basis of a meaningful political response by "theory" to a number of contemporary international issues?

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?

The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, "disposable populations" within a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art).

The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future.

When Ivory Towers Were Black lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education. It tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students earned degrees from a world-class university. The story takes place in New York City at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and spans a decade of institutional evolution that mirrored the emergence and denouement of the Black Power Movement. Chronicling a surprisingly little-known era in U.S. educational, architectural, and urban history, the book traces an evolutionary arc that begins with an unsettling effort to end Columbia’s exercise of authoritarian power on campus and in the community, and ends with an equally unsettling return to the status quo.

When Ivory Towers Were Black follows two university units that steered the School of Architecture toward an emancipatory approach to education early along its evolutionary arc: the school’s Division of Planning and the university-wide Ford Foundation–funded Urban Center. It illustrates both units’ struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve them, and their revolutionary white peers, in improving Harlem’s slum conditions. The evolutionary arc ends as backlash against reforms wrought by civil rights legislation grew and whites bought into President Richard M. Nixon’s law-and-order agenda. The story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four Columbia alumni who received the gift of an Ivy League education during this era of transformation but who exited the School of Architecture to find the doors of their careers all but closed due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.

When Ivory Towers Were Black assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of this bold experiment to achieve racial justice in the school and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community. It demonstrates how the experiment’s triumphs lived on not only in the lives of the ethnic minority graduates but also as best practices in university/community relationships and in the fields of architecture and urban planning. The book can inform contemporary struggles for racial and economic equality as an array of crushing injustices generate movements similar to those of the 1960s and ’70s. Its first-person portrayal of how a transformative process was reversed can help extend the period of experimentation, and it can also help reopen the door of opportunity to ethnic minority students, who are still in strikingly short supply in elite professions like architecture and planning.

As a break from their ordained labors, what might the Muses today do on their lunch hour? This collection of witty, shrewd, and imaginative essays addresses interdisciplinary topics that range widely from Shakespeare, to psychoanalysis, to the practice of higher education today. With the ease born of deep knowledge, Marjorie Garber moves from comical journalistic quirks (“Fig Leaves”) to the curious return of myth and ritual in the theories of evolutionary psychologists (“Ovid, Now and Then”).

Two themes emerge consistently in Garber’s latest exploration of symptoms of culture. The first is that to predict the “next big thing” in literary studies we should look back at ideas and practices set aside by a previous generation of critics. In the past several decades we have seen the reemergence of—for example—textual editing, biography, character criticism, aesthetics, and philology as “hot” new areas for critical intervention. The second theme expands on this observation, making the case for “cultural forgetting” as the way the arts and humanities renew themselves, both within fields and across them. Although she is never represented in traditional paintings or poetry, a missing Muse—we can call her Amnesia—turns out to be a key figure for the creation of theory and criticism in the arts.

This groundbreaking collection explores the important ways Jesuits have employed rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion and the current art of communications, from the sixteenth century to the present. Much of the history of how Jesuit traditions contributed to the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy has been lost, effaced, or dispersed. As a result, those interested in Jesuit education and higher education in the United States, as well as scholars and teachers of rhetoric, are often unaware of this living 450-year-old tradition. Written by highly regarded scholars of rhetoric, composition, education, philosophy, and history, many based at Jesuit colleges and universities, the essays in this volume explore the tradition of Jesuit rhetorical education—that is, constructing “a more usable past” and a viable future for eloquentia perfecta, the Jesuits’ chief aim for the liberal arts. Intended to foster eloquence across the curriculum and into the world beyond, Jesuit rhetoric integrates intellectual rigor, broad knowledge, civic action, and spiritual discernment as the chief goals of the educational experience.

Consummate scholars and rhetors, the early Jesuits employed all the intellectual and language arts as “contemplatives in action,” preaching and undertaking missionary, educational, and charitable works in the world. The study, pedagogy, and practice of classical grammar and rhetoric, adapted to Christian humanism, naturally provided a central focus of this powerful educational system as part of the Jesuit commitment to the Ministries of the Word. This book traces the development of Jesuit rhetoric in Renaissance Europe, follows its expansion to the United States, and documents its reemergence on campuses and in scholarly discussions across America in the twenty-first century.

Traditions of Eloquence provides a wellspring of insight into the past, present, and future of Jesuit rhetorical traditions. In a period of ongoing reformulations and applications of Jesuit educational mission and identity, this collection of compelling essays helps provide historical context, a sense of continuity in current practice, and a platform for creating future curricula and pedagogy. Moreover it is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding a core aspect of the Jesuit educational heritage.

When Ivory Towers Were Black lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education. It tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students earned degrees from a world-class university. The story takes place in New York City at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and spans a decade of institutional evolution that mirrored the emergence and denouement of the Black Power Movement. Chronicling a surprisingly little-known era in U.S. educational, architectural, and urban history, the book traces an evolutionary arc that begins with an unsettling effort to end Columbia’s exercise of authoritarian power on campus and in the community, and ends with an equally unsettling return to the status quo.

When Ivory Towers Were Black follows two university units that steered the School of Architecture toward an emancipatory approach to education early along its evolutionary arc: the school’s Division of Planning and the university-wide Ford Foundation–funded Urban Center. It illustrates both units’ struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve them, and their revolutionary white peers, in improving Harlem’s slum conditions. The evolutionary arc ends as backlash against reforms wrought by civil rights legislation grew and whites bought into President Richard M. Nixon’s law-and-order agenda. The story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four Columbia alumni who received the gift of an Ivy League education during this era of transformation but who exited the School of Architecture to find the doors of their careers all but closed due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.

When Ivory Towers Were Black assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of this bold experiment to achieve racial justice in the school and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community. It demonstrates how the experiment’s triumphs lived on not only in the lives of the ethnic minority graduates but also as best practices in university/community relationships and in the fields of architecture and urban planning. The book can inform contemporary struggles for racial and economic equality as an array of crushing injustices generate movements similar to those of the 1960s and ’70s. Its first-person portrayal of how a transformative process was reversed can help extend the period of experimentation, and it can also help reopen the door of opportunity to ethnic minority students, who are still in strikingly short supply in elite professions like architecture and planning.

As a break from their ordained labors, what might the Muses today do on their lunch hour? This collection of witty, shrewd, and imaginative essays addresses interdisciplinary topics that range widely from Shakespeare, to psychoanalysis, to the practice of higher education today. With the ease born of deep knowledge, Marjorie Garber moves from comical journalistic quirks (“Fig Leaves”) to the curious return of myth and ritual in the theories of evolutionary psychologists (“Ovid, Now and Then”).

Two themes emerge consistently in Garber’s latest exploration of symptoms of culture. The first is that to predict the “next big thing” in literary studies we should look back at ideas and practices set aside by a previous generation of critics. In the past several decades we have seen the reemergence of—for example—textual editing, biography, character criticism, aesthetics, and philology as “hot” new areas for critical intervention. The second theme expands on this observation, making the case for “cultural forgetting” as the way the arts and humanities renew themselves, both within fields and across them. Although she is never represented in traditional paintings or poetry, a missing Muse—we can call her Amnesia—turns out to be a key figure for the creation of theory and criticism in the arts.

This groundbreaking collection explores the important ways Jesuits have employed rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion and the current art of communications, from the sixteenth century to the present. Much of the history of how Jesuit traditions contributed to the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy has been lost, effaced, or dispersed. As a result, those interested in Jesuit education and higher education in the United States, as well as scholars and teachers of rhetoric, are often unaware of this living 450-year-old tradition. Written by highly regarded scholars of rhetoric, composition, education, philosophy, and history, many based at Jesuit colleges and universities, the essays in this volume explore the tradition of Jesuit rhetorical education—that is, constructing “a more usable past” and a viable future for eloquentia perfecta, the Jesuits’ chief aim for the liberal arts. Intended to foster eloquence across the curriculum and into the world beyond, Jesuit rhetoric integrates intellectual rigor, broad knowledge, civic action, and spiritual discernment as the chief goals of the educational experience.

Consummate scholars and rhetors, the early Jesuits employed all the intellectual and language arts as “contemplatives in action,” preaching and undertaking missionary, educational, and charitable works in the world. The study, pedagogy, and practice of classical grammar and rhetoric, adapted to Christian humanism, naturally provided a central focus of this powerful educational system as part of the Jesuit commitment to the Ministries of the Word. This book traces the development of Jesuit rhetoric in Renaissance Europe, follows its expansion to the United States, and documents its reemergence on campuses and in scholarly discussions across America in the twenty-first century.

Traditions of Eloquence provides a wellspring of insight into the past, present, and future of Jesuit rhetorical traditions. In a period of ongoing reformulations and applications of Jesuit educational mission and identity, this collection of compelling essays helps provide historical context, a sense of continuity in current practice, and a platform for creating future curricula and pedagogy. Moreover it is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding a core aspect of the Jesuit educational heritage.

From the Free Academy to CUNY provides the first generally accessible narrative of the development of the City University of New York from its inception in 1847 as the Free Academy to its present status as the largest urban university in the country. The book includes an extensive bibliography of books, articles, dissertations and major policy documents, as well as chapter notes and an index.

The Free Academy was born in controversy and today the City University of New York is again in the midst of controversial changes. This book provides the background necessary to understand how the municipal college system emerged, developed and became a university. Over 120 annotated illustrations dramatize the 150 years in which it has been facing the challenge of educating “the children of the whole people.” This book tells the story of an institution that, directly and indirectly has influenced the lives of innumerable New Yorkers, their families and New York City.

In late summer 1940, as war spread across Europe and as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression, an anticommunist hysteria convulsed New York City. Targeting the city’s municipal colleges and public schools, the New York state legislature’s Rapp-Coudert investigation dragged hundreds of suspects before public and private tribunals to root out a perceived communist conspiracy to hijack the city’s teachers unions, subvert public education, and indoctrinate the nation’s youth.

Drawing on the vast archive of Rapp-Coudert records, Bad Faith provides the first full history of this witch-hunt, which lasted from August 1940 to March 1942. Anticipating McCarthyism and making it possible, the episode would have repercussions for decades to come.

In recapturing this moment in the history of prewar anticommunism, Bad Faith challenges assumptions about the origins of McCarthyism, the liberal political tradition, and the role of anticommunism in modern American life. With roots in the city’s political culture, Rapp-Coudert enjoyed the support of not only conservatives but also key liberal reformers and intellectuals who, well before the Cold War raised threats to national security, joined in accusing communists of “bad faith” and branded them enemies of American democracy.

Exploring fundamental schisms between liberals and communists, Bad Faith uncovers a dark, “countersubversive” side of liberalism, which involved charges of misrepresentation, lying, and deception, and led many liberals to argue that the communist left should be excluded from American educational institutions and political life. This study of the Rapp-Coudert inquisition raises difficult questions about the good faith of the many liberals willing to aid and endorse the emerging Red scare, as they sacrificed principles of open debate and academic freedom in the interest of achieving what they believed would be effective modern government based on bipartisanship and a new and seemingly permanent economic prosperity.

The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation.

The introduction of theory into English studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of investments at the same time that institutional conflicts between them became more intense than ever before.

Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures who shaped and were shaped by this new landscape—including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour—the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than is usually understood from the perspective of either literature or composition alone.

Possessing a clear view of the entire discipline is essential today as the contemporary corporate university pushes English studies to abandon its liberal arts tradition and embrace a more vocational curriculum. This book provides important conceptual tools for responding to and resisting in this environment.

This book tells the story of how a team of colleagues at Boston College took an unusual approach (working with a design consultancy) to renewing their core and in the process energized administrators, faculty, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation. It aims to provide insight into what they did and why they did it and to provide a candid account of what has worked and what has not worked. Although all institutions are different, they believe their experiences can provide guidance to others who want to change their general education curriculum or who are being asked to teach core or general education courses in new ways.

The book also includes short essays by a number of faculty colleagues who have been teaching in BC’s new innovative core courses, providing practical advice about the challenges of trying interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, project-or problem-based learning, intentional reflection, and other new structures and pedagogies for the first time. It will also address some of the nuts and bolts issues they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.

In late summer 1940, as war spread across Europe and as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression, an anticommunist hysteria convulsed New York City. Targeting the city’s municipal colleges and public schools, the New York state legislature’s Rapp-Coudert investigation dragged hundreds of suspects before public and private tribunals to root out a perceived communist conspiracy to hijack the city’s teachers unions, subvert public education, and indoctrinate the nation’s youth.

Drawing on the vast archive of Rapp-Coudert records, Bad Faith provides the first full history of this witch-hunt, which lasted from August 1940 to March 1942. Anticipating McCarthyism and making it possible, the episode would have repercussions for decades to come.

In recapturing this moment in the history of prewar anticommunism, Bad Faith challenges assumptions about the origins of McCarthyism, the liberal political tradition, and the role of anticommunism in modern American life. With roots in the city’s political culture, Rapp-Coudert enjoyed the support of not only conservatives but also key liberal reformers and intellectuals who, well before the Cold War raised threats to national security, joined in accusing communists of “bad faith” and branded them enemies of American democracy.

Exploring fundamental schisms between liberals and communists, Bad Faith uncovers a dark, “countersubversive” side of liberalism, which involved charges of misrepresentation, lying, and deception, and led many liberals to argue that the communist left should be excluded from American educational institutions and political life. This study of the Rapp-Coudert inquisition raises difficult questions about the good faith of the many liberals willing to aid and endorse the emerging Red scare, as they sacrificed principles of open debate and academic freedom in the interest of achieving what they believed would be effective modern government based on bipartisanship and a new and seemingly permanent economic prosperity.

This book tells the story of how a team of colleagues at Boston College took an unusual approach (working with a design consultancy) to renewing their core and in the process energized administrators, faculty, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation. It aims to provide insight into what they did and why they did it and to provide a candid account of what has worked and what has not worked. Although all institutions are different, they believe their experiences can provide guidance to others who want to change their general education curriculum or who are being asked to teach core or general education courses in new ways.

The book also includes short essays by a number of faculty colleagues who have been teaching in BC’s new innovative core courses, providing practical advice about the challenges of trying interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, project-or problem-based learning, intentional reflection, and other new structures and pedagogies for the first time. It will also address some of the nuts and bolts issues they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.

Third Place, Catholic Media Association: Catholic Social Teaching

Gerald J. Beyer’s Just Universities discusses ways that U.S. Catholic institutions of higher education have embodied or failed to embody Catholic social teaching in their campus policies and practices. Beyer argues that the corporatization of the university has infected U.S. higher education with hyper-individualistic models and practices that hinder the ability of Catholic institutions to create an environment imbued with bedrock values and principles of Catholic Social Teaching such as respect for human rights, solidarity, and justice. Beyer problematizes corporatized higher education and shows how it has adversely affected efforts at Catholic schools to promote worker justice on campus; equitable admissions; financial aid; retention policies; diversity and inclusion policies that treat people of color, women, and LGBTQ persons as full community members; just investment; and stewardship of resources and the environment.

Third Place, Catholic Media Association: Catholic Social Teaching

Gerald J. Beyer’s Just Universities discusses ways that U.S. Catholic institutions of higher education have embodied or failed to embody Catholic social teaching in their campus policies and practices. Beyer argues that the corporatization of the university has infected U.S. higher education with hyper-individualistic models and practices that hinder the ability of Catholic institutions to create an environment imbued with bedrock values and principles of Catholic Social Teaching such as respect for human rights, solidarity, and justice. Beyer problematizes corporatized higher education and shows how it has adversely affected efforts at Catholic schools to promote worker justice on campus; equitable admissions; financial aid; retention policies; diversity and inclusion policies that treat people of color, women, and LGBTQ persons as full community members; just investment; and stewardship of resources and the environment.

The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation.

The introduction of theory into English studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of investments at the same time that institutional conflicts between them became more intense than ever before.

Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures who shaped and were shaped by this new landscape—including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour—the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than is usually understood from the perspective of either literature or composition alone.

Possessing a clear view of the entire discipline is essential today as the contemporary corporate university pushes English studies to abandon its liberal arts tradition and embrace a more vocational curriculum. This book provides important conceptual tools for responding to and resisting in this environment.

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” in New York City at the Riverside Church. At the time, the United States framed its intervention in Vietnam as a mechanism to protect democracy worldwide. While this supposed defense of democracy raged on thousands of miles away, social protests for racial equity, political representation, and an economic livelihood for its most disenfranchised communities spread across the United States. Highlighting this contradiction in his anti-war speech, King presented his doubts regarding the government’s ability to eliminate the materialism, militarism, and racism that built the nation, a plight that continues today. Written from the perspectives of education practitioners and scholars who have personal histories with global war via (settler) colonialism, immigration, and subsequent disenfranchisement in the United States, Education at War addresses the vestiges of war that shape the lives of youth of color.

This thought-provoking collection of essays reveals how the contemporary specter of war has become a central way that racism and materialism are manifested and practiced within education. Education at War asserts that the contemporary neoliberal characterization of education and school-based reform is situated within the global political economy that has facilitated growth in the prison and military industrial complex, and simultaneous divestment from education domestically. Essays examine anti-war projects across the K–20 education continuum with chapters from educators who are from and/or work directly with the communities often pathologized in “damage-centered” educational discourse. The authors do not just frame the conditions faced by our communities as state-mediated but also as collectively resisted.

They place war, surveillance, and carcerality at the center of critical race analysis in education. Each of the chapters include a pedagogical component, including lessons and comments for educators and youth workers. In cultivating this text, the editors have contributed to building a community of educators, activists, teachers, and scholars who collectively explore how resistance can produce the opportunity for rich, diverse, and transformative learning for marginalized students and communities.

Contributors: Suzie M. Abajian, Yousef K. Baker, Dolores Calderon, Edward R. Curammeng, Chandni Desai, Maryam S. Griffin, Heather L. Horsley, David Stovall, Clayton Pierce, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Sepehr Vakil, Shirin Vossoughi,, Connie Wun, Miguel Zavala

On the urgent need to promote critical reading skills amidst rising authoritarianism

Children’s author Philip Pullman famously said that “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” While the recent rise of fascist ideology in the United States might seem a subject too large and adult to be dealt with in literature for children or teens, Annette Wannamaker proposes in How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist that there are books aimed at future generations which critique and counter fascist propaganda and mythmaking.

Works of literature can reflect fascist ideology and promote it as well, but Wannamaker proposes that some books also offer tools for understanding it. Books written for beginners can introduce readers to complex concepts, break big ideas into manageable parts, and teach readers how to read the world outside of the book. Antifascist books are ones that analyze fascistic rhetoric and storytelling, educate about America’s long history of authoritarianism, and highlight various facets of fascism such as scapegoating others and reasserting patriarchal power.

From “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the tales of Superman to Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 1619 Project and contemporary works such as All Boys Aren’t Blue and Donald Builds the Wall, Wannamaker shows how the ethos of authoritarianism is characterized by a strict hierarchy that places children at its very bottom. In doing so, she argues convincingly that books written for young people can provide a particular view from the bottom, a perspective well-suited to interrogating systems of power.

On the urgent need to promote critical reading skills amidst rising authoritarianism

Children’s author Philip Pullman famously said that “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” While the recent rise of fascist ideology in the United States might seem a subject too large and adult to be dealt with in literature for children or teens, Annette Wannamaker proposes in How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist that there are books aimed at future generations which critique and counter fascist propaganda and mythmaking.

Works of literature can reflect fascist ideology and promote it as well, but Wannamaker proposes that some books also offer tools for understanding it. Books written for beginners can introduce readers to complex concepts, break big ideas into manageable parts, and teach readers how to read the world outside of the book. Antifascist books are ones that analyze fascistic rhetoric and storytelling, educate about America’s long history of authoritarianism, and highlight various facets of fascism such as scapegoating others and reasserting patriarchal power.

From “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the tales of Superman to Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 1619 Project and contemporary works such as All Boys Aren’t Blue and Donald Builds the Wall, Wannamaker shows how the ethos of authoritarianism is characterized by a strict hierarchy that places children at its very bottom. In doing so, she argues convincingly that books written for young people can provide a particular view from the bottom, a perspective well-suited to interrogating systems of power.