Michelle Fine argues that the anti-sex rhetoric surrounding sex education and school-based health clinics does little to enhance the development of sexual responsibility and subjectivity in adolescents. Despite substantial evidence on the success of both school-based health clinics and access to sexuality information, the majority of public schools do not sanction or provide such information. As a result, female students, particularly low-income ones, suffer most from the inadequacies of present sex education policies. Current practices and language lead to increased experiences of victimization, teenage pregnancy, and increased dropout rates,and consequently, ". . . combine to exacerbate the vulnerability of young women whom schools, and the critics of sex education and school-based health clinics, claim to protect."The author combines a thorough review of the literature with her research in public schools to make a compelling argument for "sexuality education" that fosters not only the full development of a sexual self but education in its broadest sense.

Nearly twenty years after the publication of Michelle Fine's essay "Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire," the question of how sexuality education influences the development and health of adolescents remains just as relevant as it was in 1988. In this article, Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland examine the federal promotion of curricula advocating abstinence only until marriage in public schools and, in particular, how these policies constrict the development of "thick desire" in young women. Their findings highlight the fact that national policies have an uneven impact on young people and disproportionately place the burden on girls, youth of color, teens with disabilities, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender youth. With these findings in mind, the authors provide a set of research guidelines to encourage researchers, policymakers, and advocates as they collect data on, develop curricula for, and change the contexts in which young people are educated about sexuality and health.

This article critiques the assumptions about the nature and meaning of disability advanced in social‐psychological writing, suggests the origins of these assumptions, and proposes a return to a Lewinian/minority‐group analysis of the situation of people with disabilities. It concludes by placing the articles in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues in context and by presenting questions in need of further exploration.

No abstract

In order to document urban youth experiences of adults in positions of public authority, including police, educators, social workers and guards, a broad based street survey of 911 New York City‐based urban youth was conducted in which youth, stratified by race, ethnicity, gender and borough, were asked about their experiences with, attitudes toward, and trust of adult surveillance in communities and in schools. In‐depth telephone interviews were conducted with 36 youth who have experienced serious, adverse interactions with police, guards, or educators. Findings suggest that urban youth, overall, express a strong sense of betrayal by adults and report feeling mistrusted by adults, with young men of color most likely to report these perceptions.

Cultivated within the long history of psychological research dedicated to social action, this chapter traces one stream of action research, critical participatory action research (critical PAR), across the 20th and the 21st centuries in the field of psychology. Rooted in notions of democracy and social justice and drawing on critical theory (feminist, critical race, queer, disability, neo-Marxist, indigenous, and poststructural), critical PAR is an epistemology that engages research design, methods, analyses, and products through a lens of democratic participation. Joining social movements and public science, critical PAR projects document the grossly uneven structural distributions of opportunities, resources, and dignity; trouble ideological categories projected onto communities (delinquent, at risk, damaged, innocent, victim); and contest how "science" has been recruited to legitimate dominant policies and practices.In the following pages, we sketch an intentional history of the seeds of critical participatory research as they have been nurtured, buried, and then rediscovered throughout the past century of social psychology. We then turn, in some detail, to Polling for Justice, a contemporary piece of quantitative and qualitative social inquiry, designed as a participatory survey of and by youth in New York City with adult researchers, poised to track social psychological circuits of injustice and resistance as they affect the educational, criminal justice, and health experiences of urban youth (Fox et al., 2010). We purposely focus on a very traditional psychological methodthe self-completed questionnaire-to illustrate how methods, analyses, and products shift when engaging critical PAR as an epistemology. The chapter closes with a discussion of critical science to make explicit the validity claims of critical PAR.The history of critical PAR has been told through different legacies. Within education studies, critical PAR is associated with the tradition of liberation theology and Paulo Freire. Within postcolonial studies, critical PAR's lineage stretches back to the revolutionary praxis of Orlando Fals Borda in South America and Anisur Rahman in Asia. Within psychology, critical PAR is typically linked to the intellectual legacy of Kurt Lewin. In the first section of this chapter, we review a set of equally significant yet shadowed scholars, particularly women, and men of color, who helped carve the scientific path toward critical PAR as practiced within psychology in the 21st century. Each of these scholars invented social psychological methods to contest what Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994) called the "collective lie" of prevailing ideological constructions of social problems and to awaken a sense of injusticethrough research-to mobilize everyday people for change. Our intent in excavating this scholarship is to create an intellectual genealogy for contemporary PAR through a line of critical science projects in which engaged social scientists have collaborated with communities to interrogate the gap between domi...

In this article, 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.

Participatory action research represents a stance within qualitative research methods-an epistemology that assumes knowledge is rooted in social relations and most powerful when produced collaboratively through action. With a long and global history, participatory action research (PAR) has typically been practiced within community-based social action projects with a commitment to understanding, documenting, or evaluating the impact that social programs, social problems, or social movements bear on individuals and communities. PAR draws on multiple methods, some quantitative and some qualitative, but at its core it articulates a recognition that knowledge is produced in collaboration and in action.With this essay, we aim to accomplish four ends. First, we provide a cursory history of PAR, beginning with Kurt Lewin (1951) and traveling too briskly through the feminist and postcolonial writings of critical theorists. Second, we introduce readers to a PAR project we have undertaken in a women's prison in New York, documenting the impact of college on women in prison, the prison environment, and on the women's postrelease outcomes. Third, we present a glimpse at our findings and offer up an instance of analysis, demonstrating closely how we analyzed thematically and discursively data about "transformation" as a research collective of inmate and university-based researchers. Fourth, we articulate a set of reflections on our work as a PAR collective, the dilemmas of writing openly under surveillance.