Working-Class Kids Photographing Childhood: Valuing Care, Reciprocity, Sociality, and Dignity

Abstract

or barrier, to attaining this academic justice by bringing our attention to a deep contradiction that underlies contemporary U.S. society (and indeed, a contradiction that I think runs throughout many geopolitical regions across the world system). Namely, political and media elites, along with the so-called ‘‘people’’ of the nation, are vehement in their belief that higher education is a space of radical far-left ‘‘wokeist’’ ideology. In this imagination, higher education instructors are part of a propaganda machine that plagues students’ minds. Many of us who work in higher education know that this narrative is brazenly inaccurate, and Reyes’s book is a case in point. As Reyes states: ‘‘Alt-right politicians decry academia as a liberal hotbed. But in my experience, and many others’, it’s conservative and resistant to change’’ (p. 93). Ironically, changes that have been made recently push academic life even further toward precarity and conservativism, rather than what leading commentators exclaim. Moral panics over a bogeyman called ‘‘critical race theory’’ (CRT) have led seven states to ban its inclusion in public educational institutions (as of August 2022), with sixteen more states in the process of passing bills through their legislatures to the same effect. Of course, given that these states are defining CRT in such broad ways to refer to any theorizing about race and racism, we are seeing public educational institutions coming under intense pressure to avoid any critical ‘‘sociologizing’’ about structural racism. Aside from the regulation of what can and cannot be taught in higher education, the United States has also seen an increasing rollback of the tenure system, further mainstreaming the precarity and casualization of labor in the academy. Reyes’s conclusion therefore leads us to what I would see as an optimistic pessimism. The (justified) pessimism centers on the fact that the academy is shaped by capitalism, sexism, ableism, racism, homophobia, and coloniality. These are not underlying structures that can just be taught out of a system or forgotten overnight; unless we approach these structures with a pessimism and a rejection of the assumption of social progress, we have no chance of ever dismantling them. Nevertheless, optimism comes from a recognition of the malleability and durability of these structures of inequality and how they shape academic life. Once we recognize the grand size of the issues confronting us and achieve an understanding of how these structures work and make themselves felt, we gain a clearer vision of how social worlds can ultimately be transformed. Without the intention of misreading Reyes’s central messages, and with the hope that the academic community discusses this book at length, I think this optimistic pessimism is what underlies the closing remarks of the book: ‘‘change begins in small acts,’’ and sustained change requires us to create ‘‘broader structures to nurture and support one another’’ in the academy (p. 129).