Wanda Rushing

Social class, poverty, and education : policy and practice

1. Poverty, Ethnicity and Achievement in American Schools: Bruce J. Biddle 2. First Person Plural: Education as Public Property: Peter W. Cookson Jr 3. Poverty, Welfare Reform, and Childrens Achievement: Greg J. Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn 4. Linking Bordieus Concept of Capital to the Broader Field: The Case of Family-School Relationships: Annette Lareau 5. Defensive Network Orientations as Internalized Oppression: How Schools Mediate the Influence of Social Class on Adolescent Development: Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar: 6. Family Disadvantage, The Self, and Academic Achievement: David DuBois 7. Policy, Poverty and Capable Teaching: Assumptions and Issues in Policy Design: Michael S. Knapp 8. Social Class, Poverty and Schooling: Social Contexts, Educational Practices and Policy Options: Peter M. Hall

School Segregation and Its Discontents: Chaos and Community in Post-Civil Rights Memphis.

Few policies have affected American society as deeply as those related to the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Now, 60 years later, segregation persists along race and class divisions. This case study analysis of a merger that took place between 2010 and 2013 in Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee, one of the most politically contentious ones undertaken in the post–civil rights era, reveals a great deal about processes that sustain patterns of inequality. A new generation of Memphis leaders gives its perspective on education, social equality, and the future.

Globalization and the Paradoxes of Place: Poverty and Power in Memphis

At present, globalization research on complex technological and financial processes takes priority over studies of place and locality. A few cities, namely those described as “Global Cities,” receive special attention as centers of “command and control.” But most studies overlook less “essential” places and ignore the impact of local places on globalization processes. This research explains how tensions between global processes and local practices create paradoxes of place and confound predictions that globalization processes create “generic” outcomes. It focuses on Memphis, Tennessee, a less well‐known and underresearched Southern “regional” city that serves the region and the nation as a vital link in the global economy and a site of cultural innovation.

Rural Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities: The Impact of Globalization Processes and Public Policy on Economic Development

ABSTRACT The name of the Clinton Administrations Rural Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Community Program uses powerful political symbols—empowerment and community—to evoke the spirit of revitalization in distressed communities. This study assesses the programs chances for success. It reviews the legislation, program goals, and selection process; constructs a statistical profile of the 33 rural EZ/EC communities; and discusses the history of rural economic development in a world-economic system. Further, this study reviews the four policy goals of the EZ/EC Program and questions assumptions about the power of local communities and the process of globalization.

Behind a bicycling boom: Governance, cultural change and place character in Memphis, Tennessee

Drawing on theories of place, new political cultures, and idio-cultural perceptions, this paper examines the case of recent place character change in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 2009, a burgeoning bicycling culture has taken root in the city alongside a massive increase in bicycling infrastructure. We analyse how these changes are paralleled by shifts in governance emphasising amenity-based urbanism that favours themes of creative class-centred economic development. Changes also highlight the ability of contemporary urban governance to make place malleable by upending negative conceptions of the city and providing for new alternatives. Implications centre on how place may be more malleable than previously theorised, but recognise that changes serve only some populations, namely creatives and pre-existing power structures, while maintaining traditions that exclude others and contribute to racialised gentrification.

Across the pond : a comparative analysis of social capital formation in the United States and Great Britain

This study began with the observations of author Tracy Collins, a British citizen then residing in the United States, who saw many differences between Britons and Americans in leisure time, work expectations, and community life. Conversations between Collins and American co-author Wanda Rushing, and our readings of historical and contemporary comparisons of life in the two countries, led to this project. This study allowed us to conduct a comparative analysis of associational life and social capital formation in the United States and Great Britain to better understand factors that sustain civic engagement in democratic societies.

We’re Going to Graceland: Globalization and the Reimagining of Memphis

Memphis, located on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the far southwestern corner of Tennessee, is often described as the home of the blues and the birthplace of rock and roll. Variations of the music of the Mississippi Delta and the Mid-South, first performed by rural migrants on Beale Street, in juke joints, bars, and Pentecostal churches, then pressed into vinyl, became global popular music through record sales, radio broadcasts, and juke boxes during the 1950s and 1960s. For more than 50 years Memphis music, recorded by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins at Sun Studio, followed by Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Steve Cropper, and Booker T. Jones at Stax Records, as well as Beale Street blues artists such as B. B. King, has transfixed global listeners and transformed popular culture (Rushing, 2009).