This book presents thoughtful reflections and in-depth, critical analyses of the new challenges and opportunities instructors face in teaching race during what has been called the “post-racial era”. It examines the racial dimensions of the current political, economic, and cultural climate. The book features renowned scholars and experienced teachers from a range of disciplines and offers successful strategies for teaching important concepts through case studies and active learning exercises. It provides innovative strategies, novel lesson plans and classroom activities for college and university professors who seek effective methods and materials for teaching about race and racism to today’s students. A valuable handbook for educators, this book should be required reading for all graduate students and college instructors.

Fifty Key Scholars in Black Social Thought is a collaborative volume that uplifts and explores the intellectual activism and scholarly contributions of Black social thinkers. It implores readers to integrate the research of Black scholars into their teaching and research, and fundamentally, to rethink the dominant epistemological claims and philosophical underpinnings of the Western social sciences. The volume features 50 chapters, written by 55 scholars who explore the diverse contributions of notable Black thinkers, both historical and contemporary. Four thematic areas organize this work—Black epistemology, Black geopolitics, Black oppression and resistance, and Black families and communities. Through a close analysis of the fifty thinkers presented here, the chapters explore these themes while dismantling the whitewashed disciplinary histories, methodologies, and content that obscure and/or subjugate the significance of Black social thought. In addition to offering insightful and timely analysis, each chapter offers suggested readings for readers who would like to dive deeper into the work of Black social thinkers. This volume offers an accessible starting point for exploring the work of Black scholars past and present and their contributions to sociology and the social sciences more broadly. It is useful to students, academics, practitioners, and the lay public who are curious about Black social thought.

This book examines the way in which professors must confront the social implications of racial neoliberalism. Drawing on autoethnographic research from the authors’ combined 100 years of teaching experience, it recognisesrecognizes the need for faculty to negotiate their own experiences with race, as well as those of their students. It focuses on the experiential nature of teaching, and thus supplementssupplementing the fields’ focus on pedagogy, and recognisesrecognizes that professors must in fact highlight, rather than downplay, the realities of racial inequalities of the past and present. It explores the ability of instructors to make students who are not of colour feel that they are not racists, as well as their ability to make students of colour feel that they can present their experiences of racism as legitimate. A unique sociological analysis of the racial studies classroom, it will be of value to researchers, scholars and faculty with interests in race and ethnicity in education, diversity and equality in education, as well as pedagogy, the sociology of education, and teaching and learning.

Gender Warriors: Reading Contemporary Urban Fantasy offers classroom-ready original essays outlining contemporary debates about sexual objectification and gender norms in urban fantasy and examining how those cultural categories are reinforced and unraveled. The essays explore the foundations and evolutions of urban fantasy and presentations of gendered identities in a wide variety of sources, focusing not only on popular examples, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Underworld, but also on less studied works, for instance Penny Dreadful and Anita Blake. The authors address the sociocultural institutions that bind gender to the body and shape our views of gendered norms, inviting students of all experience levels to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about both theoretical and embodied constructions of gender and the production of genre and generic conventions. The text unpacks cultural norms of gender and addresses issues of identity construction within an endlessly evolving genre. This collection demonstrates the way that representations of gender and the kick-ass female urban fantasy warrior have upended and reinforced a broad range of expectations and tropes, making it a fascinating text for any course, such as first-year studies, literature, film, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, and more.

As the civic engagement gap widens across lines of race, class, and ethnicity, educators in today’s urban schools must reconsider what it means to teach for citizenship; however, few resources exist that speak to their unique contexts. Teaching for Citizenship in Urban Schools offers lessons and strategies that combines the power of inquiry-driven teaching with a funds of knowledge approach to capitalize on the lived civic experiences of urban youth and children. Teaching for Citizenship in Urban Schools presents six strategies for making civic and social studies education relevant and engaging: using photovoice for social change, conducting culturally responsive investigations of community, defining American Black founders, enacting hip-hop pedagogy, employing equity literacy to explore immigrant enclaves, and drawing on young adult fiction to teach about police violence. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, each chapter includes an overview of the strategy and lessons for both elementary and secondary students. As a whole, these lessons draw on neighborhood resources, facilitate cultural exchanges among students and teachers, create community networks, and bridge schools and communities in a shared mission of building a just and inclusive democracy. This book is for anyone who values student-centered, inquiry-driven, and culturally-sustaining pedagogies that foster a deeper understanding of citizenship within a diverse democracy.

Race in the Vampire Narrative unpacks the vampire through a collection of classroom ready original essays that explicitly connect this archetypal outsider to studies in race, ethnicity, and identity. Through essays about the first recorded vampire craze, television shows True Blood, and Being Human, movies like Blade: Trinity and Underworld, to the presentation of vampires of colour in romance novels, graphic novels, on stage and beyond, this text will open doorways to discussions about Otherness in any setting, serving as an alternative way to explore marginality through a framework that welcomes all students into the conversation. Vampires began as terrors, nightmares, the most horrifying of creatures; now they are sparkly antiheroes more likely to kill your dog than drink you to death; commodified, absorbed, and defanged. Race in the Vampire Narrative demonstrates that the vampire serves as a core metaphor for the constructions of race, and the ways in which we identify, manufacture, and commodify marginalized groups. By drawing together disparate discussions of non-white vampires in popular culture, the collection illustrates the ways in which vampires can be used to explicitly help students understand ethnicity in the modern world making this the perfect companion text to any course from First Year Studies, Sociology, History, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Criminal Justice, and so much more.

In this politically and democratically urgent collection, George Yancy and contributors argue that more than ever, we are in need of classrooms that function "dangerously"—that is, classrooms where people are not afraid to engage in critical discussions that call into question difficult political times. Collectively they demonstrate the ways activist authors and scholars must be prepared to engage in risk and vulnerability as a defense of our democratic right to practice forms of pedagogical transgression. Ideal for scholars and students of critical pedagogy, philosophy of education, and political theory, this collection delineates the necessity of critical consciousness through education, and provides ways of speaking back against authoritarian control of imaginative and critical capacities.

Films as Rhetorical Texts: Cultivating Discussion about Race, Racism, and Race Relations presents critical essays focusing on select commercial films and what they can teach us about race, racism, and race relations in America. The films in this volume are critically assessed as rhetorical texts using various aspects and components of critical race theory, recognizing that race and racism are intricately ingrained in American society. Contributors argue that by viewing and evaluating culture-centered films—often centered around race—and critically analyzing them, faculty and students can promote the opportunity for genuine open discussions about race, racism, and race relations in the United States, specifically in the higher education classroom. Scholars of film studies, media studies, race studies, and education will find this book particularly useful.

White supremacist groups are highly secretive, so their public propaganda tells us little about their operations or the people they attract. To understand the world of organized racism it is necessary to study it from the inside by talking to their members and observing their groups. Doing so reveals a disturbing picture of how fairly ordinary white people learn to embrace the vicious ideas and dangerous agendas of white supremacism. This book takes the reader inside organized racism, revealing the kind of women and men who join groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi skinheads, and what they do in those groups. The volume collects significant published works from renowned scholar Kathleen M. Blee's work on racist activism, alongside new essays on the theories, methods, and approaches of studying racist activism. Discussing topics such as emotional issues in research, the place of violence and hate in white supremacism, and how women are involved in racial terrorism, Blee makes use of a range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic observations, and interviews, to shape her findings. Written by the pioneer and leading scholar of women in racist activism, this volume is essential reading for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the areas of social movements, politics, race studies, and American history.