Rethinking Community Cultural Wealth

In this essay David Shuang Song uses Bourdieusian theory and its contemporary reapplications to address theoretical problems in Tara Yosso's concept of community cultural wealth and to propose a rethinking of the influential model. He argues for redirecting attention to how agents both make exchangeable and exchange the legitimized practices and objects in a marginalized ethnic/racial community with those of the formal education system. Song illustrates this reconceptualization through a sketch of his ethnographic research on a community school in one large city's Chinatown. His approach emphasizes key Bourdieusian concepts that are sometimes missing in education research and sociology of education, resituates Bourdieusian theory as capable of offering insights into racialization and racial oppression in the United States, and offers insights for the study of community-based education projects among people of color.