“Woke” in Love: The Persistence of Inequality in Intimate Relationships among Millennials

Abstract

season through the frame of care and recognized their constrained agency in helping students navigate stressful testing environments. Their narratives displayed how a good school in the eyes of children, which is built on reciprocal care and relational learning, can be undercut by individual, quantitative assessments of education (p. 156). In Chapter Five, Luttrell displays the longitudinal elements of her research and focuses more on temporality. Luttrell reconnects with students in high school, interviews them about their interpretations of the photos, and completes a new video/photo project for their lives as high schoolers. As high schoolers, many look back on their middle childhood through a lens of nostalgia, while maintaining a sense of an aspirational future (p. 165). In these follow-up interviews and video projects, youth acknowledge how time isn’t their own and that they do not like the conflict between instrumental versions of being in time versus more relational experiences of time (p. 186). Young people like Mesha use humor to directly defy the adult, instrumental notion of time (p. 187). Other young people, like Kendra, who is pushed into low-wage labor and whose time is structured by obligation and financial survival, are forced to absorb dominant conceptions of time use as they manage systemic race, class, and gender inequalities in their microworlds (p. 198). Luttrell asks readers to recognize that working-class teenagers locate themselves in multiple spaces as they navigate the flow of time, their identities, and development. Luttrell concludes with a rich, reflexive discussion about how counternarratives of care and collective seeing with workingclass youth can provide possible social transformations in schools (p. 203). She asks us to consider what it would mean to take seriously young people’s insights into the centrality of care (p. 213). Luttrell argues that institutionally countering neoliberal policies and discourses of education requires that care work be valued and made visible. The ways working-class young people at Park Central School recognize that care is work, that care is value, and that care is dignified in school and at home are in fact crucial to building a social world with dignity, cooperation, and a collective sense of freedom. Care must be a social good for a healthy democratic society, and collaboratively seeing the social world with young people and communities who are rendered invisible by the social status quo is one way to get to that possibility.