This FUTUREU Forum explores the challenges confronting educators and young people in education after four decades of neoliberal reform in the U.S. Emotional insecurities, loneliness, anxiety, and depression are well-documented among today’s youth, so how can we best understand and respond?

DR. VINCENT LYON-CALLO is a professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. His research focuses on poverty and class processes in the United States. A long-term Rethinking Marxism Editorial Collective member, his work engages education, housing, homelessness, and neoliberalism. His book, Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance, explores how resistance against systemic inequities becomes muted and marginalized. He was elected to the Okemos, MI, School Board for ten years. DR. BOONE SHEAR is a Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at UMass at Amherst. Dr. Shear’s work involves engaged teaching and learning projects directed toward critical investigations into the violence and limits of patriarchal capitalist modernity. It also involves efforts to uncover, cultivate, and organize around hidden, suppressed, and emerging projects that advance other-selves and other worlds.

Today’s forum was hosted by Professor Rubén Martinez and was produced by Frank Fear. Both Martinez and Fear are professors emeritus at Michigan State University. This forum is one in a series organized and sponsored by FUTUREU, CONVERSATIONS ABOUT VALUES AND CHANGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION. Go to our website at https://futureu.education/.

Selected References

Cover graphic courtesy of Resilence.org.