Violence in schools has more potential to involve large numbers of students, produce injuries, disrupt instructional time, and cause property damage than any other form of youth violence. Burning Dislike is the first book to use direct observation of everyday violent interactions to explore ethnic conflict in high schools. Why do young people engage in violence while in school? What is it about ethnicity that leads to fights?
Through the use of two direct observational studies conducted twenty-six years apart, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski documents the process of ethnic school violence from start to finish. In addition to shedding light on what causes this type of violence and how it progresses over time, Burning Dislike provides strategic policy suggestions to address this troubling phenomenon.
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society and Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods, among other books.
“Using the illustrative metaphor of a wildfire, Burning Dislike is the result of exhaustive ethnographic research on the development of ethnic violence in Oakland, Boston, and Los Angeles high schools. It will be extremely relevant to sociologists, criminologists, educators, anthropologists, social scientists, their students, and anyone else interested in the topic.”—Edward Telles, author of Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil
“Burning Dislike sets a new standard for the theory of group violence, based on the best research method yet. Tracking violence over weeks and months gives a rare picture of the process of escalation and de-escalation and an explanation of why different kinds of violence morph from one into another. Martín Sánchez-Jankowski’s analysis of de-escalating violence is a rare and welcome contribution, bringing some good news to a field mostly known for pessimistic conclusions.”—Randall Collins, author of Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory
“With careful, original research from different eras and parts of the country, Sánchez-Jankowski is the first to document the historical arc of interethnic school conflict over more than a decade. Burning Dislike locates a problem of poverty and change—an issue raised forty years ago that we continue to wrestle with today.”—Ruth Horowitz, coauthor of Street Kids, Street Drugs, Street Crime: An Examination of Drug Use and Serious Delinquency in Miami
312 pp.6 x 9
9780520289215$29.95|£25.00Paper
May 2016