QRMG Series: Critical Bifocality: The Dynamics of Privilege and Marginalization

March 14, 2016, 3:00 - 4:30 pm

Educational Sciences Room 259, 1025 West Johnson Street

Lois Weis and Michelle Fine

Distinguished Professor Educational Leadership and Policy SUNY, Buffalo; Distinguished Professor Psychology CUNY Graduate Center

Lois Weis and Michelle Fine introduce critical bifocality as a way to render visible the relations between groups to structures of power, to social policies, to history, and to large sociopolitical formations. In this collaboration, the authors draw upon ethnographic examples highlighting the macro-level structural dynamics related to globalization and neoliberalism. The authors focus on the ways in which broad-based economic and social contexts set the stage for day-to-day actions and decisions among privileged and nonprivileged parents and students in relation to schooling. Weis and Fine suggest that critical bifocality enables us to consider how researchers might account empirically for global, national, and local transformations as insinuated, embodied, and resisted by youth and adults trying to make sense of current educational and economic possibilities in massively shifting contexts.