Nora Gross - Böcker

A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss.  JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys’ Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister’s home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun’s untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys’ Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected.Brothers in Grief closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends’ and classmates’ deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school’s educational mission and teachers’ and administrators’ fraught attempts to care for students’ emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change.A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity.

Care-Based Methodologies reimagines relationships between researchers and youth participants in school-based research. The book calls attention to care-based methodologies as essential to qualitative and ethnographic research in schools, particularly when participants are youth from nondominant communities. While researchers come to schools seeking to understand youths’ lived experiences and become implicated in the quotidian rhythms of their lives, it is rare that they receive training on how to navigate the complex interpersonal dynamics and relationships that take shape during long-term school research. How can researchers ensure that they care for the wellbeing of youth, not just the stories and data collected from them? How do researchers maneuver the various roles they may come to play in youth’s lives over the course of, and beyond, a study with care? What happens when scholars transgress the traditional power dynamics of researcher-participant relationships to walk with youth in their research? This book illustrates the possibilities for conducting rigorous and responsible research that simultaneously improves our understanding of youth’s lives, cares for their wellbeing, and works toward dismantling the systems that oppress them. The editors of the volume offer an opening chapter that articulates how researchers can practice care-based methodologies with youth by centering transparency, reflexivity, reciprocity, curiosity, consent, and self-care. The chapters that follow draw from a range of qualitative and ethnographic studies to highlight how care mediates and informs the research process and offer concrete guidance for employing care-based methodologies in school-based studies with youth.