NEWS

Scholar to assess effects of poverty, social issues on education March 24

CHAPEL HILL -- An accomplished expert on the effects of poverty, diversity and social change on public education will speak on Monday (March 24) and March 28 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"Coming of Age at Minimum Wage: Youth, Poverty and Human Dignity" will be the title of the March 24 talk by Dr. Carol Stack, professor of social and cultural studies in the graduate school of education at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Doing Public Anthropology for Social Justice" will be her second talk, on March 28. Both will be free and open to the public at 3:15 p.m. in the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence. Between the talks, Stack will meet with students and faculty in the UNC School of Education, the host of her visit as a Cecil G. Sheps Visiting Scholar in Social Justice.

The first lecture title is the same as that of a book Stack is co-writing, to be published this year by the Russell Sage Foundation of New York. The work aims to bring ethnographic perspective to the field of education and focuses on inner-city black and immigrant youth working in fast-food jobs.

Stack’s 1996 book, "Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim The Rural South," won a Victor Turner Award in Humanistic Anthropology from a subsidiary of the American Anthropological Association. The prize honors books that contribute to the anthropological study of humans.

Dr. Madeleine Grumet, dean of the School of Education, said that "Call to Home" showed how urban poverty, discrimination, de-industrialization and drug wars brought some half-million African-Americans back home to the rural South between 1975 and 1990.

"She explored the call of land and family and studied the experiences of families who brought the political determination honed in the North back to their home communities in the South," said Grumet.

Stack also wrote "All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community" (1974) and co- edited "Holding on to the Land and the Lord: Essays on Kinship, Ritual, Land Tenure and Social Policy" (1982). Subjects of Stack’s books and research speak to issues that faculty and students at the school need to understand, Grumet said.

"The once-popular notion that schools are havens from society's inequities and politics no longer holds sway," she said. "It is hard to identify any teacher preparation programs that do not challenge its students to consider the home and neighborhood cultures of the diverse children they teach in order to understand what school means to them."

Stack’s visit is made possible by the Cecil G. Sheps Visiting Scholar in Social Justice Fund, an endowment created with a gift from the retired professor of social medicine. Sheps was the first director of UNC’s health services research center, which is now named in his honor.

For more information about Stack’s visit, call 919-843-6979.

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Contact: Linda Baucom, 919/962-8687, lbaucom@unc.edu