Follow nine young people as they move from racially isolated elementary and middle schools to a diverse – yet internally segregated – neighborhood high school.

In this illustrative book, author Rebecca Alexander draws from the lived experiences of the young residents of “Glenwood”, a historically Black suburb, and “Parkside”, the historically white, wealthy community just across the freeway. Focusing on an anonymised location in California during the sub-prime crisis, the book explores issues of segregation and gentrification in US schools and communities, while looking at how youth and families work to produce, contest, question, resist, and engage racialized space in and beyond schools.

Introducing the concepts of “love work”, the labor of youth and families in this context, and of “education by dispossession”, which expands on Valenzuela’s concept of subtractive schooling (in which youth are threatened with cultural eradication and offered minimal educational resources) to highlight ongoing dispossession, the author contextualises experience with theory to demonstrate how concepts in social and educational structures impact real lives.

Rebecca Alexander PhD is an Associate Professor and Chair of Education Studies at DePauw University, Indiana. Her work specializes in education and borders, and segregated schools and communities.