Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She’s also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. “Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location,” she observes in The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. As a good southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others. As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter. Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband’s business. She followed the scripts she was handed by society. But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern—make that American—white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia. For Fentress, her dodges both behind her front door and beyond became impossible to miss. Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white “segregation academies,” a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the Washington Post, Slate, Forbes and other publications. The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.
Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She’s also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. “Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location,” she observes in The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. As a good southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others. As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter. Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband’s business. She followed the scripts she was handed by society. But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern—make that American—white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia. For Fentress, her dodges both behind her front door and beyond became impossible to miss. Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white “segregation academies,” a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the Washington Post, Slate, Forbes and other publications. The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.
A Handbook for Social Science Field Research: Essays & Bibliographic Sources on Research Design and Methods provides both novice and experienced scholars with valuable insights to a select list of critical texts pertaining to a wide array of social science methods useful when doing fieldwork. Through essays on ethnography to case study, archival research, oral history, surveys, secondary data analysis, and ethics, this refreshing new collection offers "tales from the field" by renowned scholars across various disciplines. Key Features: Offers real life guidance: Personal "tales from the field" by renowned social science scholars exemplify how fieldwork requires adaptation, adoption, and flexibility with regards to methodological approaches. In addition, thoughtful commentaries on how to conduct research and pursue a research career in the social sciences offer guidance on making difficult research and career choices. Highlights vital bibliographic references: Bibliographies of critical texts help guide researchers as they broaden their methodological approaches and develop their research skills. This is not your ordinary reference list, but a compilation of the top classics and current, but soon-to-be classics, in the field of social science research. Addresses ethical concerns: Discussions of ethical concerns are presented throughout the collection, as well as a stand-alone essay on ethical considerations in field-based research. Explicit attention throughout the collection to ethical concerns is rare among methodology texts, but required as field work becomes more complex and concerns about human subjects′ safety grow. Intended Audience: Ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate social science methods courses, where there is a growing demand for multiple methods or mixed methods training; as well as a perfect, lightweight handbook for all researchers and professionals interested in having a comprehensive collection of bibliographic information for social science research
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