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This chapter draws from a three-year ethnographic study focused on the educational and community interactions among working- and middle-class ethnic Chinese immigrants in a mid-western town in the United States. Aihwa Ong (1999) argues that “Chineseness” is a fluid, cultural practice manifested within the Chinese diaspora in particular ways that relate to globalization in late modernity, immigrants’ cultural background, their place in the social structure in their home society, and their new social class status in the context they enter. The study extends research focused on the complexities of social reproduction within larger global flows of Chinese immigrants. First, we describe how Chinese immigrants’ social status in their countries of origin in part shapes middle and working-class group’s access to cultural capital and positions in the social structure of their post-migration context. Second, we trace groups’ negotiation of their relational race and class positioning in the new context (Ong, 1999) that is often invisible in the processes of social reproduction. Third, we describe how both groups must negotiate national, community, and schooling conceptions of the model minority concept (Lee, 1996) that shapes Asian-American’s lived realities in the United States; yet the continuing salience of their immigrant experience, home culture, and access to cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2007) means that they enact the “model minority” concept differently. The findings suggest the complexity of Chinese immigrants’ accommodation of and resistance to normative ideologies and local structures that cumulatively contribute to social reproduction on the basis of class.

This paper, an exploration into Black women cultural consumers of Tyler Perry Productions, examines the ways cultural consumption practices contribute to transformative ideologies and behaviors.

This regionally diverse ethnography using yo-yo fieldwork in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, and New Orleans, is based upon the author’s experiences over the course of five years engaging theater attendees and the casts and crew members of multiple Perry productions.

The author first discusses the dichotomous and provocative responses to Perry’s work by scholars, critics, and consumers of Tyler Perry Productions. After an ethnographically rich discussion of the setting surrounding a performance of the stage play Madea’s Big Happy Family, the author discusses how Black women report Perry’s work as a site of resistance to, and resources for responding to, microaggressions and other structures of oppression.

Building on the work of black feminist theory (Bobo, 2001, B. Smith, 1998) and black feminist theater aesthetic (Anderson, 2008), this paper, by crafting a Black Women’s Theatre Aesthetic that, for the first time, engages with and gives primacy to the consumers of theatrical productions, opens a portal for understanding the creative ways Black women call into play cultural consumption practices as tools and devices for transformative praxis.

We explore the effects and interplay of physical and social environments on the inaccessibility of gynecological health care for women with spinal cord injury. We also explore women’s responses to the inaccessibility of this care, in hopes of trying to understand better how women navigate their gynecological health and health care when faced with physical and social environmental constraints.

The data for this phenomenological study were gathered using in-depth, qualitative interviews with 20 women living with spinal cord injuries in or around Detroit, Michigan. Each interviewee was questioned about overall health and physical functioning, accessibility of doctor offices, interactions with health care providers, gynecological health-seeking behaviors, and complementary and alternative medicine use. In this paper we report on data on women’s difficulties in securing gynecological health care experiences and related attitudes and practices.

Findings echo past literature about the inaccessibility of doctor’s offices, including the lack of suitable exam tables and medical equipment. Office staff varied in their willingness to help transfer women from wheelchairs to exam tables as well, often creating what we term an inaccessible social environment. Individual women in our sample found different strategies for navigating the environmental contexts of a doctor’s office and the encounters that they had with providers within medical settings. These strategies had varying impacts on individuals’ abilities to secure gynecological health care.

Our findings point to the possibility of an interplay between and intersection of physical and social environments within medical settings that needs to be explored further and, potentially, the primary importance of the social environment over the physical environment in determining whether an individual’s disability makes health care inaccessible.

Youth in juvenile corrections settings have significant academic, behavioral, and mental health needs. Additionally, a disproportionate percentage of them are identified with a diagnosed disability, with Emotional Disturbance (ED) as the most common diagnosis. Despite these facts, appropriate education and intensive mental health care is often lacking in these settings. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that some facilities use methods such as disciplinary confinement as a response to behavioral infractions; a practice that is not only counterproductive to rehabilitation, but violates federal education law and established legal standards. This study examined the use of disciplinary confinement in a juvenile justice system and investigated factors associated with frequency of this practice and time spent in disciplinary confinement. Participants were 2,353 youth with and without identified disabilities at state-run juvenile corrections facilities. Results indicated that students with disabilities spent considerably more time in disciplinary confinement than students without disabilities. Students with ED spent considerably more time than students in other disability categories and students without disabilities. Additionally, Black students, Black students with ED, and Hispanic students with ED spent considerably more time in disciplinary seclusion than other groups. The authors discuss results with respect to disproportionate use of disciplinary confinement and provide subsequent recommendations including the reexamination of disciplinary confinement practices by leaders in juvenile corrections.