American Sidewinder Dropouts In A Polarizing Society Ride .

Evaluation & Program Consultancy Work:Spring 2013 University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Hired to design andimplement program evaluations including medical/dental practitioner focus groupand individual telephone interviews with 33 participants.Teaching Experience:Summer 2009 Instructor Introduction to Philosophy to gifted seniorsSummer Institute for the Gifted (SIG).2007-2008Instructor World Cultures to freshmen P/TPiedmont High School, Piedmont, CAResponsible for design and implementation of curriculum using an equity andsocial justice framework.2003-2005Instructor World History to freshmen and sophomores F/TSecondary School of Research, Brooklyn, NYResponsible for design and implementation of curriculum using an equity andsocial justice framework.2002Instructor US History – Junior High, P/TJohn Ericsson Middle School, Brooklyn, NY.Responsible for design and implementation of curriculum using an equity andsocial justice framework.Community Research/Urban Planning:2010-2012Assistant DirectorOvercomers With Hope - A Media Arts Training Program for At Risk Youth,WestOakland, Oakland, California.Assisting in the promotion and conceptualization of OWH’s youth program in themedia arts and technologies, tasks included grant writing, networking with localorganizations and city officials, and recruiting.2000Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, NY, NY. Producedtwo background papers on development initiatives in Asia, including holisticdevelopment models and resource mobilization. Worked under direction of Prof.Shian-Lung Lai, Chief Economist of UNDESA.Published Works, Research Papers and Reports:Social CritiqueHeating Up the Neoliberal Agenda: The GOP on Economic Stimulus (2002). Printed by CulturalLogic, online journal at http://clogic.eserver.org/2002/2002.html.Business Entrepreneur/ Jewelry Designer, 1998-2000Created ‘Blue Nails Union Jewelers’, making wax cast/sterling jewelryAccepted as jewelry vendor in Sarah MacLachlan’s Lilith Fair Musical Concert Tour’s vendorvillage, touring 50 states plus Canada in summer 1998 and 1999. Working with 2-3 paid staff,vi

selling hand-made sterling silver pendants and bracelets manufactured in Oakland, CA and inTaxco, Mexico.Personal Affiliations and Interests:ASA (American Sociological Association)InterestsPoetry and prose published in various journals, including: Antipodes, 360 Degrees, DisturbedGuillotine, Cultural Logic and Caveat Lector. Other interests: Jewelry design, cycling,racquetball and oil painting (works shown in various cafes).vii

SOCIAL WATERS OF RISK AND THE DROPOUT SURGEThe Dropout Crisis as a Communal Crisis of Social ProportionsIn 2010, a youth, soon to disappear from the area temporarily, at seventeen asked rhetorically,“What we got out down here in the Lower Bottoms? Answering ”We ain’t got nothing. Weain’t got no theaters if you want to get involved in something, you have to go to San Francisco.Our parks have needles in the grass.” She wasn’t alone in her opinion as many of the youth inthe area share a similar sentiment, that is, regarding austerity and its larger social disadvantageescaping attention under the eye of a market development plan posing as urban recovery andsocial governance.Considering the statement, what is actually being said with regard to the integrity o fopportunity, particularly, local opportunity? Like 2009 and 2010, 2011 was also an extremelyaustere year for local youth in the recessed Lower Bottoms, in pockets of North Oakland and theworking class flatlands overall. Realities in terms of opportunity, school orientation andorganization, jobs, what constitutes criminal conduct, what constitutes guilty punishment, andthe nature of the plea bargain were all changing – just to name a few. These experiences werechanging rapidly, though nonetheless remained deeply embedded in a larger structuraltransformation of the city completely foreign to youth raised to believe in individual enterpriseand effort. The larger recession-based structural transformation (aka the ‘Great Transformation’)was also concealed – increasingly as the recession conditions rolled on through the years – by anarrative of the unbounded possibility of community. While clearly impacting the individual,these accumulative changes would not have people concluding that the American city was notthe city it had been just five years earlier until this too began to flourish as its own narrative inthe hyper-accelerated period of change that followed in the post-Occupy climate of 2012 and2013.Big change wove itself through the neighborhood resonating in West Oakland’s Lower Bottomsin ways visible and invisible to youth just as to the cartographer precisely because so much of thechange was internal to the institutional system. Whether or not youth tales affirming claims ofgreater austerity of resources and inequities are correct is essential to the deeper probe as to whyyouth segue and/or “drift” (cf. Matza, 1964) into channels clearly marked by risk rather thanremaining in school and/or enrolling in some form of vocation-based certification credentialing.Who are these youth? Based on interviews conducted in the public schools, its continuationschools, through community events, conferences, meetings, rehabilitation centers, Juvenile Hall,and with local youth and young adults (18-25), it is argued that these youth come of age throughthe 2000s are not exclusively of a ‘Scapegoat Generation’, a tag used to describe youth denied bythe system while blamed by the system through the 1990s. It is also suggested that tags such as‘the Abandoned Generation’ and ‘the Lost Generation’ used to refer to youth come of age in the2000s again denied and/or overlooked by the system touch on aspects of a larger socialconditioning of Generation Negation. Specific to the idea of Generation Negation is the deep1

understanding of a faulty social reproduction 1 that, as it works across all social domains, includesa state of being reflective of a collapsed social. Generation Negation acknowledges the idea ofmistreated, lost, delinquent, and/or drifting individuals but only as emblematic of the largersocietal collapse. Unique to Generation Negation is the emphasis on the fact that that theseyouth have been abandoned in a systemic way that is seamless across all social domains ofoperation and production including economic and political. Critical to the concept of GenerationNegation, as Davis (1999) saw and wrote on youth in a socially at risk society in the late 1990s,these youth were the initial product of a society that embraced social negation coming of age in aperiod when the word “welfare” took on a ‘distasteful association with charity, lay-about, and/orbum. And yet, in the 2010s, if the time is given to reflect on early neoliberal era assumptionsand processual transformation that was legitimized and actually took place thereafter, it is noweasy to recognize that far more than welfare was lost; the larger social state itself was lost whilehidden behind an attack on the ‘welfare’ goliath. These youth are its meandering product.In dismantling the social state and its attendant vital sociality, many cuts have negatively touchedyouths’ lives. Critically, it is the synthesis of modes of social negation (e.g., in the ongoingdefunding of public education, the dismantling of public employment opportunities, theelimination of large national job training programs) that have together created an interwovenweb of negation and emaciated opportunity for these youth of the last few decades with littlerecognition. Once again, as in the 1980s, the aspect of social injustice is obscured throughinstitutional adjustments, a rhetoric of choice, and the promise of enhanced freedom. As with the2005 “Open Enrollment” implemented in Oakland at the same time that the conservative smallschools break up of large schools was implemented, it appeared a seeming ‘freedom’ thatallowed youth to enroll in schools out of their area. While meaning that a handful of youth fromthe neighborhood would bus out of the area, doing more damage than good, the process alsocontributed to hard times for those not accepted or unable to make the commute.Subsequently attending the same local schools, the schools were now contending with lessfunding due in part to reduced student enrollment compounded by general public educationfunding cuts. At the same time indicative of the circularity of decay, accountability in thesesame schools decayed as administrations hid the fact of dropouts by not showing the drop unlessand until the youth had officially signed out, a rarely adhered to procedure. In hindsight,changed standards of operations foreshadowed the school closure epidemic and charter schoolconversion quick to follow during the early years of Great Recession recovery. The pre-Reaganeducational standard of needs-based funding suffered the hardest blows under new pressures tiedto administrative funding dependency. Twisting the administrative budget and standard, schoolsand districts were made to lean heavily towards compromising needs-based standards for thesake of a hoped for institutional self-preservation. At the same time, greater institutional semiautonomy further eroded the universality of administrative regulatory standards, widening thefinancial gulf between top administration and staff; internal to the educational domain, it was asocial phenomenon mirroring the larger rejection of equity-based development central to the newneoliberal standard. With a self-preservation fear/decentralizing operations fusion driving amassive wedge into the system, the inequality of the larger neoliberal social manifest as the1Social reproduction is a sociological term referring to the reproduction of the life-ways, habits, customs and thelike reproducing inequality from one generation to the next (cf. Bowles & Gintis, 1976).2

polarization between educations’ administration and staff, student programs and its youth.Youth were receiving less indirectly through reduced funds, resources, services, progra

the twentieth century, in the latest advanced stages of hyper-neoliberalism, social exclusion/push-out is experienced uniformly across all domains of societal operation (e.g., political,