Ranita Ray (Sociology) gave an invited presentation at the UCLA Department of Sociology Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecture Series Ethnography Working Group in February. Titled "Making of a Teenage Service Class," the talk related to her upcoming book with University of California Press.  

Abstract: Many of the stereotypes of low-income urban youth in America that circulate in the media and among scholars and policy makers focus on drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood and ignore marginalized youths' complex trajectories toward educational and occupational mobility. Young adults who pursue and experience relative mobility in an environment filled with great hardships are viewed as aberrations. Focusing on the complex relationship between poverty, education, work, and upward social mobility, Making of A Teenage Service Class explores why and how some youth are able to overcome barriers, and pursue and achieve relative success (and what this success looks like) in an environment of deprivation and inequality while others in the same environment fall prey to the predicaments of poverty.