Against a backdrop of massive public school reform, single-sex public schools have become an increasingly popular, but controversial, option for parents and their children. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that single-sex public education today is merely the latest twist in a long-term, historically-situated trajectory of gender- and race-separated schooling in the United States. Drawing on 11 months of intensive fieldwork, over 140 in-depth interviews, and an analysis of documents at two single-sex, nearly all-African American public high schools in the large east coast of "Morgan," I ask: What interventions do single-sex public schools make on behalf of their African American male students? And what impact do those interventions have on the boys' masculinity formation and life chances?

At "Perry High," a grades 7-12 neighborhood public school, officials and community members identified mass incarceration and the lack of caregiving as acute, interrelated crises facing their young African American male students. The administrators desired for their boys to grow to become responsible husbands and fathers, and the boys themselves aspired to be these men. The school, however, lacked the resources and strategies to remove many of the boys off the school-to-prison pipeline. At "Urban Charter," a charter school serving boys in grades 9-11, staff and "consumer" buy-in and a strong formal, academic curriculum enabled the school to remove more of their boys from the school-to-prison pipeline and to place them on a college track. The school also depended on a second hidden curriculum that sought to protect the boys from the perceived degradation of regular public schools, and in particular the threatening specter of the boys who attended those schools. School officials desired for their students to become respectable, middle-class workers in a global economy.

These findings extend knowledge on African American boys and schooling in several ways. I show that single-sex public schools that target this population rely little on beliefs in gender differences between boys and girls, and instead primarily on the unique vulnerabilities of African American boys. I also build on research on caregiving within schools and show how schools frame mass incarceration as a miscarriage of justice requiring certain provisions of care, and how boys desired care from adults. Last, I show how different institutional histories and capacities, particularly between regular public schools and public charters, greatly impact the ability of schools to intervene on behalf of their young Black men and to "save" them.

In 1996, Congress overhauled welfare policy to encourage work and marriage as routes to economic self-sufficiency for poor American families. This led to the subsequent creation of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) in 2002. The HMI has funded hundreds of relationship skills and marriage education programs across the country, many targeting poor and low-income unmarried couples with children. To date, very little of the social scientific and policy debate over the value of such programs has focused on what relationship skills-based government-sponsored marriage promotion actually involves in practice. To address this gap, this dissertation draws on data collected data during an 18-month participant observation study of one federally-funded relationship skills program for low-income, unmarried parents called Thriving Families, including in-depth interviews with 60 program staff, instructors, and participants.

I find that Thriving Families couples delayed marriage because of a phenomenon I call curtailed commitment, the belief that if they cannot live up to middle-class ideas of family life, including meeting a specific economic threshold, couples are not equipped for marriage. Staff and instructors employed three primary strategies to encourage couples to overcome this reluctance: 1) rather than promoting marriage directly, they promoted a healthy co-parenting relationship, preferably within the context of marriage, as the best resource poor parents have to bolster their children's life chances; 2) they reframed what I call marital masculinity by suggesting that marriageable men are those who have the capacity to be caring co-parents and good communicators, qualities that do not depend on their ability to live up to middle-class norms of male breadwinning; and 3) they tried to teach parents financial management skills that would presumably enable them to have more money and communication skills to help them talk through relationship problems. Though economic constraints challenged their abilities to use the skills promoted by the program, parents viewed the classes as a rare opportunity to communicate free of the material constraints that overwhelmingly characterized their daily lives and their intimate relationships. This suggests that rather than promoting an instrumental view of marriage--that marriage prevents poverty--healthy marriage policy could likely better serve disadvantaged families by acknowledging and addressing the socioeconomic roots of curtailed commitment as part of public efforts to strengthen family relationships.

The teachers of poor, urban schoolchildren of color are currently at the center of an ideological battle over educational inequality in the US. The popular media and political rhetoric dichotomize teachers as heroes or villains and blame them for persistent achievement gaps related to race and class. Although teachers are indeed central to educational processes, this scapegoating elides the ways in which inherently unequal schooling conditions constrain teachers' ability to engage their students. To move beyond reductive accounts of teaching, my research examines the institutional and interpersonal factors that shape teachers' experiences and practices of caregiving. I provide critical insights into connections between student needs, school resources, and teachers' care and ways in which these are implicated in the reproduction of inequality. Theoretically, these findings illustrate the importance of connecting structural inequalities to lived human experience. Practically, my research suggests new approaches to supporting teachers' work and challenging the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality.

This dissertation explores teachers' experiences of unequal schooling conditions through in-depth interviews with 60 teachers in three public high schools located in different school districts of Los Angeles County. The schools I selected were de facto segregated in terms of race and class demographics: One served a student population that was wealthy and majority white with a large Asian American minority; the other two schools served populations that were low-income, majority Latino and African American. Each school had a historical relationship to white flight and distinctive connections between the school and the community. The site selection makes a critical contribution to the study of segregated schools by opening up the Black-white binary to understand shifting demographics and by examining the ongoing preservation of white privilege. I coined the term "quarantined disadvantage" to describe the current, unequal conditions of schooling in Los Angeles suburban schools.

To examine the effects of three unequal school contexts on teachers' subjective experiences, I conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews with teachers, covering topics such as the teachers' personal background, significant school-based relationships, and their work context. Drawing on these interviews, I demonstrate that inequality is reproduced through circumscribing teachers' ability to meet students' diverse needs through the provision of care; however, teachers' care also provides fertile ground for radical challenges to institutional inequality. This dissertation intervenes in the study of school inequality by shifting the focus from the material conditions of segregated schools and their effects on student outcomes to the social conditions of segregated schools and their effects on teacher emotions. I explain how the adults most intimately connected with unequal educational conditions and student disadvantage: (1) bear the psychic weight of racist social policies and processes; (2) reap particular psychic rewards from relationships with various populations of students and parents; and (3) cognitively support working within a system of schooling that systematically privileges some students while disadvantaging others. This research interrogates how race and class inequality that appears prima facie shocking to outsiders is lived, reproduced, and sometimes challenged through the daily experience of caring and dedicated teachers.

Feminist scholars have established care work as a key site for intersecting systems of power. The naturalization of feminized caring legitimates the institutionalized coercion and exploitation of care work, inflecting a matrix of inequalities built up around these relations of caring labor. However, there has been little systematic analysis of the mechanisms of social reproduction through caring labor in a medical setting. This project, based on three years of IRB-approved ethnography of RNs and CNAs at work in a California hospital, addresses this gap. It analyzes the social processes in the social construction of care, illustrating how RNs created and used culture to mitigate coercion, exploitation, and subordination. Specifically, they used semiotic codes—and their respective sets of daily practices—to define what counted as “care” in particular contexts. They also delegated tasks linked with servitude to CNAs through rituals of subordination. These processes enabled RNs to assert professional power, but they also linked status differentiation to empathy/disempathy, facilitated affective structures and subjectivities of disempathy, and reproduced racialized relations of domination between themselves and the CNAs. Thus, mechanisms of empathy/disempathy reproduced inequality. This analysis identifies the limitations of professional nursing power based on the ideological dichotomization of emotional and technical dimensions of medical work and highlights how this ideology—and the structure of feelings that animate it—obscures the actual role of empathy as medical work. This research leads to the formulation of a general theory of empathy/disempathy as a mechanism that contributes to inequality. The argument is that structures of domination, coercion, and exploitation devalue and constrain care throughout the social formation. Institutions that order these power relations are organized through affective structures—and their corresponding ideologies and subjectivities—that link status differentiation to empathy/disempathy. Mechanisms of empathy/disempathy rearticulate the ideological interpellation of subjects by shaping “subject-centric” perceptions of power and determining the processes through which people produce and use culture to rationalize it. On one hand, hegemonic structures of feeling constrain capacities to care and facilitate subjectivities of disempathy. These subjectivities refract experiences of agency through disempathy, power, and status. On the other hand, another category of subjectivity, which I call double-agency, constructs experiences of agency through capacities for empathy— and estrangement from those very capacities. Consequently, processes of empathy/disempathy function as a mechanism in the social reproduction of inequality.

Since beginning its rapid transition to a market economy in 1978, the People's Republic of China has sought to become internationally dominant. In order to develop human capital and labor power, it has implemented a range of ideologically-driven policies that have been geared towards improving the overall mental, moral and physical "quality" (suzhi) of the population. The current criteria for assessing the individual value of citizens have resulted in new lines of stratification being drawn among children. As a result, healthy rural daughters and special needs children in particular are now considered unworthy of intensive investment and face a higher likelihood of being abandoned to state care. However, in an ironic twist of globalization, stigmatized children who were once shut away in state-run orphanages have become major recipients of western aid and child-saving interventions as China continues to "open up" to the outside world.

Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two Chinese state orphanages that received financial and medical assistance from western non-governmental organizations, I consider the role that globalization is playing in the lives of abandoned youth. This is occurring in two main ways: by the exportation of healthy female children out of the country through transnational adoption and the importation of first-world ideologies and practices by foreigners who seek to improve care for the mostly male special needs youth who are left behind. Through interviews and participant observation with western volunteers and Chinese state caregivers, I demonstrate the ways in which defining the "best interests" of institutionalized children is a highly contested process that implicates international power dynamics and differential access to resources.

I argue that foreign-Chinese collaborations in orphanages are complex processes of negotiation, conflict and compromise that highlight the socially-constructed and contextual nature of children's social value. Moreover, these types of partnerships take place on constantly shifting political terrain, rendering them highly unstable and at times even counter-productive for those they seek to help. Ultimately, by bringing children who exist on the margins of society to the center of scholarly analysis, this research provides a new perspective on the human consequences of Chinese modernization in a globalized era.

Due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wives of U.S. Army soldiers experienced having their loved ones in harm's way for more than ten years. This dissertation presents more than 70 in-depth interviews with active duty (regular army) and national guard wives to examine how these women understand the hardships in a military marriage. The divorce revolution and the introduction of an all-volunteer force have loosened the control that these institutions once had over the individual. Consequently, today's army wives are mostly on their own in making sense of the difficulties they face.

This project presents a comprehensive analysis of how army wives make sense of having a loved one in harm's way at different periods of the military time cycle and in two social contexts: living on base or living among civilians (Chapter One). Army wives draw upon duty, commitment and obligation to answer the critical questions of how much they are willing to suffer and for whom (Chapter Two). These categories of thinking correspond to the institutional demands that both the military and marriage made on women in the past and are believed to make today (Chapter Three). For whom wives see themselves enduring hardships, however, depends on the social context in which they live (Chapter Four). Regular army wives living in a military community focus on their commitment to the partnership at the core of their marriage and family. National guard wives living among civilian neighbors see their efforts as the fulfillment of a duty to the country and even to the people of other countries. The difference is counter-intuitive but reflects how the shapes of their social communities influence the meanings wives make of their situations.

During deployment (Chapter Five), regular army wives come to see the beneficiaries of their sacrifice to include other army wives. In the military base's context of mutual scrutiny and accountability, they see this extension of their commitment as a way to keep their own husbands safe while fighting overseas. National guard wives, living in isolation from other army wives and separated from their civilian neighbors by the demands of deployment, find deployment to be a special period that reaffirms their thinking in terms of duty and sacrifice toward a greater good.

As their husbands return from war (Chapter Six), wives face the unexpected difficulties of family reintegration and shift their thinking once again. With redeployment (Chapter Seven), thinking across both military and civilian contexts converges. By the second, third, and even fourth overseas combat tour, both regular army and national guard wives are making sense of what they still have to endure in similar terms.

Over the cycles of military deployment, reunion, and redeployment, army wives come to share an understanding of risks in terms of individual obligations and reciprocities (Conclusion). Initially, social context divides their thinking into open-ended terms of duty and commitment. As they move through these cycles, both the amount of hardships and for whom they see themselves suffering become more specified and narrow in terms of obligation. This shift is not catastrophic for military marriages, but constitutes the adaptive process by which army families become resilient. The convergence in their thinking toward more individualistic terms does not reflect a broad historic trend toward individualism or the unavailability of patriotic sacrifice as a justification, but it is a reflection of the different contexts of place and time in which they live their lives.