Suchergebnisse

During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States—a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle class residents, witnessing up close the seemingly overnight success of a "new entrepreneurial" class, negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security. The Burdens of Aspiration explores the imprint of the region's success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the region's working and middle class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students—low-income, "at-risk" Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high tech industry within an "under-performing" public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a "high-performing" public school with informal connections to the tech elite—Elsa Davidson offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, she provides keen insights into the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth

AbstractThis article examines middle class children's and parents' complex engagements with contemporary practices of cultivation, care and surveillance focused on children's social and emotional capacities and differences. Emblematic of a sociality and emotion‐focused biopolitics of childhood, such care provokes moments of spontaneous connection and self‐expression for children even as they engage dynamics of disciplining control and normalisation, an outcome that may work against and towards the objectives of care. Moreover, parental investments in social–emotional care reveal adults' conflicted implication in dynamics of child normalisation, and the potential of this form of caretaking to generate politically valuable empathic insight.

This article draws on ethnographic and archival material to examine a contemporary, neuroscience informed politics of care focused on the child sensorium (understood as an embodied neurobiological endowment and material and political resource). I frame care-taking practices focused on children's sensory endowment, responsivity, and difference as a form of biopolitical regulation in which children, parents, therapists, and educators are implicated. As such, I examine how such care intersects with political, economic, and educational forces and circumstances that differentiate North American childhoods and reconfigure expectations of children and parents. In the process, I relate medicalized sensory difference to shifting skill demands for children that emphasize emotional control in public and educational contexts. Moreover, I highlight how privileged parental engagements with scientific knowledge and practices of therapeutic care focused on children's sensory endowments and difference articulate with these new skill demands but also deploy embodied sensorial–neurological difference/neurodiversity as a means to transform dynamics of stigma and control within children's and families' lives and educational contexts. At the same time, I show how attempts to cultivate sensory capacities and engagements with medicalized sensory difference are implicated in broader biopolitical dynamic of exclusion that unevenly recognizes difference/disability.

Cultures@SiliconValley. J. A. English‐Lueck. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 201 pp.

This article serves as an introduction to the special section on Sensorial Politics, which includes articles by Nicholas Caverly, Elsa Davidson, Susan Falls and Ali Kenner. The introduction outlines the arguments of the articles before proceeding to a discussion of the common themes they illuminate as a whole. In particular, they address four key issues: the relationship between the sensorial and the political; the role of sensorial disruption and its political effects; the issue of labor; and the issue of knowledge. We conclude that while these pieces advance our understanding of the relationships between the sensorium and politics, they also open up avenues for ongoing research and theorization, particularly in our contemporary situation, in which the Covid-19 pandemic has recast sensorial politics in new ways.