Working Method

Lois Weis is Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.Michelle Fine is Professor of Social-Personality Psychology at the City University of New York, Graduate Center.

"Lois Weis and Michelle Fine have established themselves as leading figures working at the intersection of qualitative research and critical educational theory. In this important new book, they move back and forth between theory and practice, working the borders and the fissures in ways that open up new ways of thinking and performing educational research that is committed to social justice." -- Dennis Carlson, Miami University of Ohio"Working Method demonstrates the potential that rigorous, theoretically informed qualitative research has for understanding the experience of youth and creating changed lives. Weis and Fine deftly explore forms of oppression and spaces for change, all with a sense of hope and possibility." -- Jane Gaskell, Dean of Education at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education at the University of Toronto

• Introduction: Compositional Studies in Four Parts: Critical Theorizing and Analysis on Social (In)Justice, Lois Weis and Michelle Fine Section One: Full Composition and Initial Fracturing 1: Dear Zora: A Letter to Zora Neale Hurston Fifty Years after Brown, Michelle Fine, Janice Bloom, April Burns, Lori Chajet, Monique Guishard, Tiffany Perkins-Munn and María Elena Torre Section Two: Deep Work Within a Fracture 2: Race, Gender and Critique: African American Women, White Women, and Domestic Violence in the 1980s and 1990s, Lois Weis 3: Civics Lessons: The Color and Class of Betrayal, Michelle Fine, April Burns, Yassar Payne and María Elena Torre Section Three: Designs for Historic Analysis 4: Gender, Masculinity and the New Economy, Lois Weis Section Four: Designs to Document Sites of Possibility 5: Participatory Action Research: From Within and Beyond Prison Bars, Michelle Fine, María Elena Torre, Kathy Boudin, Iris Bowen, Judith Clark, Donna Hylton, Migdalia Martinez, Missy Melissa Rivera, Rosemarie A. Roberts, Pamela Smart, and Debora Upegui 6: Extraordinary Conversations in Public Schools, Lois Weis and Michelle Fine Epilogue Notes