ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 focuses on the framing of ‘race’ and examines the ways ‘race’, class and gender are operationalised in educational research. It draws upon two theoretical concepts, ‘intersectionality’ and ‘community cultural wealth’.
‘Intersectionality’ has been used as a framework whereby ‘race’, ethnicity, social class and other social divisions can be theorised as lived realities. The book utilises a cross-sectional view of the intersecting institutional and policy relations that produce and link these social relations.
The concept of ‘community cultural wealth’ identifies how ‘Communities of Color’ possess distinct forms of cultural capital that are incompatible with dominant Bourdieusian forms of cultural capital but are able to produce the same results. Within this framework particular networks e.g. diaspora, are central to the exposure to, and transfer of, cultural capital. Community cultural wealth is used to interrogate the Black community’s political mobilisation around racial inequality in education.
Additionally, by examining ideas of community cultural wealth in critical race theory’s scholarship and performativity, the chapter aims to illuminate and theorise how young Black men in pursuit of educational success exhibit Black masculinity, and how their intersectional identities influence the educational strategies they employ and their performance of those strategies.
