Environment in the lives of children and families: perspectives from India and the UK

Abstract

finding a job, but also that their esthetic labor is not evaluated in the same way as they are expected to show a greater measure of respect. It is here that Besen-Cassino’s findings resonate with the other book under review, Ranita Ray’s The Making of a Teenage Service Class. Ray offers an ethnographic analysis of the lives of 16 black and Latina/o youth (aged 17–20 years old) from economically marginalized families in ‘Port City’ in the United States. (These youth present the core of the analysis, but the author interviewed another 40 youth to further contextualize these data.) Once a thriving fishing capital on the northeast coast, ‘Port City’ is in de midst of a prolonged period of de-industrialization and economic recession: at the time of research, a quarter of the town’s population was living below the poverty line. Ray shows how poverty affects the lives of these youth study in numerous ways, ranging from problems of hunger and untreated illnesses, to lack of access to public transportation and limited knowledge about how to navigate bureaucratic systems of college applications. The youth in this study identify working hard and staying away from drug use, violence and early pregnancy as key strategies to improve their life changes. They hope to continue to college and dream of a future of white-collar jobs and middle-class lifestyles. The focus on these aspirations provides an important counterpoint to the preoccupation of parents, school authorities and non-profit organizations with the policing of racialized and gendered ‘risk behaviors’ they associate with poor black and brown youth. Ray argues that this concern overlooks other important factors that undermine young people’s efforts to escape poverty and diverts already meager resources that policymakers could have used to support young people with technology, food, transportation and advice about their education goals. For these youth getting and staying into college is only possible in combination with their earnings from a low-wage, part-time jobs in retail and service sectors. While the money they earn from these jobs goes some way to pay for college, in the long term these same jobs often undermine the youth’s education goals. Eventually, the irregular schedules and time young people invest in lowwage service jobs start to interfere with their classes, with many youth moving back and forth between intermittent college enrollment and part-time jobs. In the end, neither attending haphazard classes in college, nor the emotional and flexible labor of insecure and low-income retail and service jobs offer a viable pathway to upward social mobility. Taken together, these two books provide ample evidence and inspiration for scholars to further analyze young people’s early workplace experiences and the lessons young people learn there about race, gender and workplace inequality. These experiences are not just relevant to the contemporary realities of young people’s lives, but also produce social effects that linger on long after they have entered the adult labor force. In addition, the books are well suited for teaching in courses on labor studies, gender and youth studies as students will be able to discuss and relate to the dynamic case studies presented by the authors.