For the middle class and the affluent, local ties seem to matter less and less these days, but in the inner city, your life can be irrevocably shaped by what block you live on. "Living the Drama" takes a close look at three neighborhoods in Boston to analyze the many complex ways that the context of community shapes the daily lives and…

The purpose of this article is to discuss the ways in which the social, political and cultural foundation of the headscarf as a symbol affects the nature and practice of educational life. It will examine the ways in which the headscarf practice is constructed in the public sphere. In order to understand the headscarf practice in Turkey the nature…

The paper arises from my PhD thesis on the learner biographies of retail and motor vehicle maintenance apprentices in Germany and England which explores the interrelationship of social structures and individual agency in identity formation over time and in particular learning environments. The paper reports initial findings, focusing largely on…

Objective: We examined whether individual-level social capital--the intangible resources in a community available through membership in social networks or other social structures and perceived trust in the community--was associated with acculturation, depression and anxiety symptoms, and perceived access to services among women of Mexican…

Students in special education programs can have widely divergent experiences. For some, special education amounts to a dumping ground where schools unload their problem students, while for others, it provides access to services and accommodations that drastically improve chances of succeeding in school and beyond. "Distinguishing…

At the current historical juncture in which differences and inequalities are surfacing greater than ever in the world, societies, and schools, the main goal of this essay is to revisit the aspects of structuralism that can potentially contribute productively to understanding the invisible structures and forces that everyone carries (mostly…

We develop a new theoretical framework that explains the engagement in child labor of children in developing countries. This framework distinguishes three levels (household, district and nation) and three groups of explanatory variables: Resources, Structure and Culture. Each of the three groups refers to another strand of the literature;…

Justifiably concerned about power dynamics between researchers and participants in participatory research, much of the literature proposes guidelines for including participant voices at every step of the research process. We find these guidelines insufficient for dealing with constraints set up by the social organizational structures in which…

Based on a collaborative ethnography with Lideres Campesinas, a state-wide farmworker women's organization in California, this essay explores how activists have created multi-issued organizing strategies grounded in family structures and a community-based social world. Building on Gloria Anzaldua's theory of nepantla, it illustrates how campesina…

Despite their diverse national backgrounds, 28 interviewees speak similarly about the complexity of the cultural realities with which they live, and refuse to be pinned down to specific cultural types. While nation is of great importance, unless personally inspiring, it tends to be an external force which is in conflict with a wide variety of…

Computer-based clinical simulations are a powerful teaching and learning tool because of their ability to expand healthcare students' clinical experience by providing practice-based learning. Despite the benefits of traditional computer-based clinical simulations, there are significant issues that arise when incorporating them into a flexible,…

A conceptualization of gendered interpersonal aggression that is grounded in the social ecological framework is presented to explicate factors in adolescents' gendered environments that give rise to aggression and victimization. The focus is on gendered social structures and social networks. Our framework for prevention suggests that violence…

The purpose of our study was to investigate African American women's experiences with sexual objectification. Utilizing grounded theory methodology as well as Black feminist thought and objectification theory as the research lenses, the results of this study uncovered how racist, sexist, and classist ideologies contributed to sexual…

The purpose of this study is to seek to understand the process of privatisation and deregulation of Israel's higher education system which had been until the late 20th century predominantly public. Since 1994, public and governmental agencies became major clients of private universities. Thus the public sector played a major role in the expansion…

The authors used a mixed methods approach to examine if the reputation of a housing area has bearing on residential wellbeing and social trust in three pairs of socioeconomically contrasting neighborhoods in a Swedish urban municipality. Multilevel logistic regression analyses were performed to examine associations between area reputation and…