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Contemporary discussions of globalisation (in general) and postcolonialism (more specifically) have largely remained wed to critiques of the West, including around its outsized role in the proliferation of neoliberal economic logics. As Chen argues in "Asia as Method," these discussions have precluded other kinds of discussions about globalisation and its "theories"--those that are generated between Asian countries and peoples (recognising that "Asia" itself is a construction). In this essay, we look towards a different kind of conversation about the postcolonialism, one that does not take the West as its primary interlocutor. We will look closely at two South Korean contemporary artists--Do Ho Suh (1962-) and Kimsooja (1957-)--and see how they work through contemporary, material concerns around "home" and "place". In particular, these artists point us towards "movement" as a trope for displacing extant concerns with fixed identity and as a kind of ontological state of being in the world.

This article revisits the central impulse behind early advocacy for ethnographic approaches to hip hop--that critics should try as much as possible to limit their own certainties around what hip hop can and might mean. While ethnographic approaches can engender the kinds of personal dislocations that allow for this negotiation, they do not necessarily do so. Moreover, certain ethnographic approaches risk overly localizing the study of popular culture at a time when cultural phenomena need to be understood in global context. New forms of self-reflexivity are necessary for scholars and critics who look to "frame" hip hop as an object of analysis.

In this paper, I trace three traditions and bodies of work: The Chicago School of Sociology, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and the New Sociology of Education. Each of these traditions evolved in distinct though overlapping ways. Taken together, they offer a productive set of resources for thinking through the complexities of popular culture and education today. These traditions are of course not meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather, I approach them as pieces of "context" to evoke the work of Leslie Fiedler--ways of drawing circles around particular texts. The goal, as always, is to find the places where they cannot explain away the particularity of texts and practices in their "ambiguity and plentitude." I hope to encourage a particular kind of critical disposition towards popular texts. (Contains 1 note.)

This article critically explores Harry Torrance's four-volume edited collection "Qualitative Research Methods in Education." The author argues that this text is an important intervention in the constitution of a meta-discourse on qualitative research today. Torrance pays particular attention to the field of education, providing much needed historical and genealogical perspectives on contemporary discussions in the field.

The question of "resistance" has oriented the field of critical ethnography for several generations now. Indeed, the reproduction-resistance binary has animated much of the most important, critical work in educational studies over the last 30 years. Yet, this reproduction-resistance binary has perhaps calcified in recent years. Such work often searches for elusive moments of "authenticity" and "resistance" in time, pulling them out, celebrating them, exporting them to understand other sets of people in other social circumstances. Comparatively little work has treated resistance as a fluid and dynamic construct. This short essay offers some cautionary notes in this regard.

Set against trans- or supra-national policy initiatives which have framed the HIV/AIDS pandemic as in part a pedagogical issue, this paper critically explores local understandings of sexual practices (generally) as well as of HIV/AIDS (more specifically) among young people in the sub-Saharan African country of Ethiopia. Ethiopia has the third largest number of HIV/AIDS infections in the world, behind only South Africa and India. Like many countries dealing with this pandemic, the Ethiopian government has articulated its response to a broader set of global presses, including those around information and education. Such responses, we will argue, are helpful but have important limitations. As this study shows, knowledge about safer sex practices and the dangers of HIV/AIDS are by now well known among many Ethiopian youth. Yet, this knowledge does not always effect behavioral change. Taking condom use as a key exemplar, we will look at how Ethiopian youth narrate their own sexual experiences, conduct, and practices. Deeply informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we look to open new "thinking tools" for a range of actors addressing this global pandemic in situated contexts. In particular, we challenge the "pedagogical subject"--a subject lacking key information--interpolated into many of these policies. We highlight, instead, new disjunctures between emergent discourses around sex and sexuality as well as long-standing, conservative attitudes toward gender. (Contains 1 note.)

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the "real business" of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a "perfect storm" for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of "vulnerability" as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education--a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment. (Contains 1 note.)

Background/Context: As the economy grows ever more tight, the school (K-16) is increasingly important in relation to life choices and outcomes, and researchers who focus on youth culture, often in and out of school contexts, can no longer afford to ignore such traditional educational institutions. If school credentials do not "guarantee" social mobility, they are certainly the sine qua non of such mobility in the New Economy. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: In this article, we put these concerns into dialogue with recent work (including our own) that valorizes out-of-school settings and popular texts as sites for the production of authentic and vibrant youth identities. We find ourselves less and less able to read youth practices as removed from the structural realities of schooling and the economic context within which this all plays out. This means that we can no longer valorize youth practices as disconnected from their broader context because the linkage between "success" in school (defined in particular ways such as test scores, attainment, and so forth) and economic and social possibility is becoming tighter than ever. The consequences of what we often theorize as vibrant youth identities as produced in out-of-school sites, then, must be examined and theorized as part of a long-term intellectual project that explores such identities in school spaces and beyond. Research Design: For this article, we critically interrogated and synthesized extant research in three key areas: the New Economy and globalized capitalism; the production of youth identities through popular culture and out-of-school learning settings; and qualitative research and multi-sited ethnography. Conclusions/Recommendations: We offer reconceptualized multi-sited ethnographic approaches as one potential set of responses to this central challenge now facing educational researchers: bridging concerns around the attenuation of economic opportunities for youth and current work on the vibrancy of youths' cultural lives.

Edward Said is deservedly well known for his literary insights on Orientalism. Yet, his work on the nature of the intellectual is equally important and particularly critical for navigating this moment of political, cultural, and economic retrenchment. In this essay I will explore the contours of Said's work on the intellectual. I argue that Said gave us a model of intellectual activity at a moment when we have to manage multiple professional and political obligations and responsibilities, all of which are ever-intensifying. I draw out particular implications for understanding the changing role of schools of education in the USA today.

In this essay, the authors join with an emergent set of voices shifting intellectual focus to postcolonial carnivalesque practices. Here, they refer to writers such as Paget Henry (2000), Hommi Babha (1994), Michael Dash (1990), Sandra Drake (1989), and Russell McDougall (1989). The authors are particularly interested in the carnivalesque as manifested in the literary works of third world writers and the extent to which the carnivalesque discourse within third world fiction is an enabling system of representation that generates a new, subaltern subjectivity at the epicenter of the novel form. They use as an exemplar of these developments the work of the Guyanese novelist, Wilson Harris. They discuss his novels "Carnival," "Palace of the Peacock," and "Companions of the Day and Night"--three novels that herald the age of multiplicity that now defines the terms of existence for modern subjects attempting to negotiate contemporary social institutions such as schooling. Contemporary school practice seems paralyzed when confronted with the new developments in world cultures toward hybridity, falling back, instead, on a default curriculum that privileges monoculturalism or a diluted form of multiculturalism. These dominant curriculum models preserve the imperialist disciplinary core of the organization of school knowledge and pedagogy. The carnivalesque postcolonial writing of novelists such as Harris offers pedagogues new models of thoughtfulness that challenge the tendency toward intellectual isolationism and cultural insularity in the educational enterprise.

Examined how two urban teens used key popular texts to construct a sense of place by mobilizing the texts in very specific ways (finding specific thematic links between and across them and using them to index their relationships with family in this city and "down South"). Highlights the complex, emergent, and "messy" relationships many youth have with popular culture. (SM)

Looks at how young people use historical knowledge, gained from media sources, to deal with current situations. A group of young African Americans draw on behavioral examples from the film, "Panther," instead of school-based learning, to give them ways to deal with the Ku Klux Klan in their neighborhood. (DAJ)

Discusses Henry Giroux's, Alan Block's, and John Devine's differing viewpoints on how cultural incorporation and routinization of schooling undermine its capacity to address the needs of contemporary youth. They all maintain that schooling has become a site of symbolic and physical violence which students experience in multiple ways. The paper examines their writings on popular culture, violence, and schooling. (SM)

The dialogic emergence of culture is considered in terms of identity changes during a research program at a community center.