ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of scholarship that focuses on societal influences that infiltrate life in schools. It aims to provide an overview of potential sources of critical cosmopolitan agency that could be located in the histories of the students and their current lives in school. The chapter demonstrates the polymorphous kosmopolitan seeds that exist in the lives within and outside of schools for newcomers. When students enter schools in the US, they are inevitably exposed to structural forces that influence their social and academic integration experiences. Racism and its persistence at a global scale are reproduced within schools, as well. Displaying an in-depth understanding of associations between socio-economic status and violence, the students problematized the public opinion. The sense of empowerment that students felt in the context of their new society and school is also reflected in their responses to religious discrimination.
