In The Culture Trap, Derron Wallace argues that the overreliance on culture to explain Black students' achievement and behavior in schools is a trap that undermines the historical factors and institutional processes that shape how Black students experience schooling. This trap is consequential for a host of racial and ethnic minority youth in schools, including Black Caribbean young people in London and New York City.

Since the 1920s, Black Caribbeans in New York have been considered a high-achieving Black model minority. Conversely, since the 1950s, Black Caribbeans in London have been regarded as a chronically underachieving minority. In both contexts, however, it is often suggested that Caribbean culture informs their status, whether as a celebrated minority in the US or as a demoted minority in Britain.

Drawing on rich observations, interviews and archives in London and New York City schools, Wallace suggests that the use of culture to justify Black Caribbean students’ achievement obscures the very real ways that school structures, institutional processes, and colonial conditions influence the racial, gender and class inequalities Black youth experience in schools. Wallace reveals how culture is at times used as an alibi for racism in schools, and points out what educators, parents and students can do to change the beliefs and practices that reinforce racism.

Derron Wallace is the Jacob S. Potofsky Chair in Sociology and Associate Professor of Sociology and Education at Brandeis University in Boston, USA. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. From 2022 to 2023, Wallace was a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Durham University. A sociologist of race, ethnicity and education, Wallace’s research focuses on structural and cultural inequalities in urban schools and neighbourhoods as experienced by Black youth. In 2023, Wallace received the American Educational Research Association’s Early Career Award for research on the social context of education. He also received the Doris Entwisle Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association for research on the sociology of education.

This inter-disciplinary conference brings together experts on questions of climate change, agrarian transformations and labor to help us reflect on the future of work.

Overview

The future of work is hot. Literally. Unpredictable seasons, droughts, floods, warming temperatures, rising seas, and a host of other climatic factors are changing what work is, what it means, and what it does to the body. These effects are unevenly felt across geographies and forms of difference.

These effects spill out beyond the factories, fields, and construction sites scholars conventionally associate with legible acts of labor. Self-employed or “informal” workers in cities face new threats from the compounding factors of rising heat and air pollution. Ecotourism sectors have been reconfigured to make climate crisis, extinction, and other consequences of planetary change into sites for “disaster tourism” and consumption. A low-paid service industry coalesces around climate dystopia. The bodily effects of heat and work are newly burdening women, who disproportionately perform unremunerated, devalued reproductive labor in domestic spaces. Questions about the future of work in the context of climate crisis, then, are as much about techno-fixes as they are about home and family.

See the full list of speakers on the registration page.

Join the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies's Global Public Voices fellows for a roundtable discussion exploring global free speech as part of Cornell's freedom of expression theme year.

This year's fellows are seasoned media voices, ready to advocate on global free speech questions central to current events, public policy, and their international research expertise.

Freedom of Expression Faculty Fellows

Oumar Ba, Assistant Professor, GovernmentAlexandra Dufresne, Professor of the Practice, Cornell Brooks School of Public PolicySharif Hozoori, IIE-SRF Fellow and Visiting Scholar Karim-Aly Saleh Kassam, International Professor of Environmental and Indigenous StudiesThe Einaudi Center's undergraduate global scholars will present their freedom of expression capstone projects at an accompanying event at 4 p.m. in Mann 112 (CALS Zone) prior to this event.