Linda Waldron | Christopher Newport University (original) (raw)
Papers by Linda Waldron
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2018
Dangerous fires do not break out from every spark. Whether a spark leads to nothing or creates a ... more Dangerous fires do not break out from every spark. Whether a spark leads to nothing or creates a raging wildfire depends greatly on the context, including the local ecology, the presence of kindling, the climate, the recent weather trends, and the prevailing winds. In Burning Dislike: Ethnic Violence in High Schools, Martı́n Sánchez-Jankowski uses this metaphor to craft a similar argument about racially motivated violence among high school students. Although it might be easy to simply attribute these bad incidents to bad young people, they are much better understood through their sociological context. Fortunately, readers can learn from the safety of their living rooms, because Sánchez-Jankowski spent five years in high schools observing individual violence, small group violence, brawls, riots, and stampedes. This superbly researched text includes the author’s initial findings on conflict between white and African American students in Boston from 1974 to 1976 along with his follow-up studies on conflict between Latino and African American students in Oakland and Los Angeles from 2000 to 2003. To better identify key factors that lead to ethnic violence, he selected different types of schools for observation: both middleand lower-class schools, and both schools that had already reported ethnic violence and schools that had not. Sánchez-Jankowski’s approach to data collection was relatively straightforward: he essentially wrote down everything he saw and heard, tape-recorded conversations, and carried a stopwatch to time the duration of incidents. He also verified any important details he missed with multiple independent witnesses. For the most part, however, he did not intervene in the violent incidents or report them to school officials or the police. Although, as the author himself acknowledges, this raises some ethical questions, none of the incidents he witnessed resulted in fatalities; and he suggests this approach significantly improved his ability to accurately study this social problem. Because students quickly learned that he would not get involved or report them, they were less likely to alter their behavior in his presence. Burning Dislike includes a large number of quotes from the students themselves, so it almost feels like they are speaking directly to readers—voicing their prejudices, fears, and anger. These quotes include the nasty slurs and stereotyping that ethnic conflict is often built on, which means they may simultaneously come across as both very offensive and very real. Sánchez-Jankowski uses these statements to shed light on what students think in various stages of the violence process, such as how their perceptions of other racial groups create a climate in which minor conflicts may quickly escalate and why their resistance to post-violence reconciliation may be particularly entrenched. He also does an excellent job in identifying thematic patterns across races, such as how white, black, and Latino students often make essentially the same types of arguments that can facilitate violence. For example, high school students of Irish American, African American, and Mexican American descent all pointed to suffering and adversity in their own cultural histories to justify their lack of empathy for the suffering of others. For scholars, an added benefit of these many quotes is that they offer a wealth of information for potential analysis beyond the scope of this book. Sánchez-Jankowski also presents thoughtprovoking tables and figures that document the duration of violent incidents and map the trajectory of school violence throughout the study periods. Although some school fights can be stopped in a matter of seconds, ethnic violence often lasts for a frighteningly long time. For example, one fight at Oakland’s Kaiser High school lasted fourteen minutes before the dominant assailant 216 Reviews
Social Sciences, 2017
Emerging adults are encountering a developmental stage in a polymediated world that brings autono... more Emerging adults are encountering a developmental stage in a polymediated world that brings autonomy, intimacy, and identity to the forefront of their transition from adolescence to adulthood. This study focuses on traditionally-aged college students who are deeply immersed with digital technology and communication as a primary method to communicate and interact with peers, partners, teachers, and family members. To understand the relationship between digital communication and emerging adulthood, researchers facilitated a qualitative study grounded in ethnomethodological and dramaturgical perspective to uncover the unique ways in which college students make sense of their social media during this developmental time period. Data collection occurred through nine focus groups; in all, 44 undergraduate students participated. Findings illustrate four relevant patterns to the development of emerging adults: a key rationale for use among participants that is tied to both ritualized behavior...
Sociological Studies of Children and Youth
I began my research at two suburban high schools in the spring of 2000, shortly after the one-yea... more I began my research at two suburban high schools in the spring of 2000, shortly after the one-year “anniversary” of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado. On April 20, 1999, Dylan Kelbold and Eric Harris entered their school and killed 10 classmates and 1 teacher, wounded 23 others, and then took their own lives in the library. It was the worst mass murder ever to take place on school grounds in the United States. I was particularly interested in looking at suburban schools during this time period because statistics showed juvenile crime, and in particular violence within the school systems, was on the decline, yet the perception of school violence seemed unrelated to these statistics (Brooks, Schiraldi, & Ziegenberg, 2000; Cook, 2000; Glassner, 1999). Following the widespread national attention given to the Columbine shootings,1 public polls showed 71% of Americans believed a school shooting was likely to happen in their community (Brooks et al., 2000). A month after the Columbine shootings, a Gallup Poll found 52% of parents still feared for their children's safety at school (Brooks et al., 2000). I was interested in learning how this perception of violence and fear shaped the everyday lives of kids going to schools throughout the United States. I wanted to know how schools dealt with issues of violence and safety at the local level, and in particular, how discipline and punishment was thought about, practiced, and negotiated within public-school settings.
Communication and Information Technologies Annual, 2014
Research limitations/implications Future research should move beyond print media to examine how T... more Research limitations/implications Future research should move beyond print media to examine how TV, popular culture, and social media sites construct this problem. This should include research on the public’s understanding and interpretation of these mediated forms of communication.
This is a multi-method qualitative study of how youth understand Columbine, school and youth viol... more This is a multi-method qualitative study of how youth understand Columbine, school and youth violence, and school safety in relationship to perspectives that are presented in the mainstream media and by school officials. This work centers kids\u27 discourses and pays close attention to the struggles that youth at two public high schools identify and prioritize, expanding work within the interpretive and social constructionist perspectives. It further challenges the homogeneity of youth by analyzing the talk of teens as intersecting with larger spheres of race, class, gender and sexuality, utilizing intersectional theory to analyze youth and violence. This dissertation problematizes the nation\u27s focus on Columbine by examining the multiple and diverse perceptions that youth have of school violence. Race and social class are central to how they negotiate the significance, or lack of significance, of Columbine in their daily lives. Additionally, this project expands the focus on weapons-related school violence by analyzing how youth experience daily forms of hidden violence, from harassment to bullying to discrimination, that are both pervasive and damaging to their lives. These forms of violence often get played out in verbal and physical fights. For boys, fights often are about maintaining a sense of power over others or sustaining a rigid form of masculinity that is rooted in aggression, violence and heterosexuality. Although girls often utilize fights as a way to transgress traditional feminine roles and maintain power, they are also often about self-defense, gaining respect, or maintaining a sense of popularity at the school. Although school policies and mechanisms of surveillance attempt to deal with such issues, consequences are inconsistent, particularly when schools lack stability and resources. Additionally, punitive forms of getting rid of kids to solve violence often works to sustain violence rather than prevent it. I argue that in order to create safe schools, the continuum of violence must be incorporated into school policies and curriculum, and relationships between kids, school officials, counselors and teachers must be given more priority than punitive consequences or additional mechanisms of surveillance, such as video cameras and metal detectors
Humanity & Society, 2006
Doreen E. Martinez career has focused on cultural epistemology. Her interest in this area is born... more Doreen E. Martinez career has focused on cultural epistemology. Her interest in this area is borne out of her own mixed ancestry that is Mescalero Apache, Mexican and Pennsylvania Dutch. Her research and teaching commitments are focused on the meanings individuals and communities make of their cosmological understandings and cultural practices. She has completed over 13 years of work with U.S. Indigenous women and is especially interested in how culture is represented and practiced from original standpoints not merely in reflection or response to outside influences. Her interest in the Maasai project was to investigate these very concepts and issues e.g., culture, cosmology, and preservation within a transnational framework.
Sociology Compass, 2009
Author's introduction Although criminologists have long dominated the field of school violence re... more Author's introduction Although criminologists have long dominated the field of school violence research, there has been a growing body of research by cultural sociologists in this area as well. In many ways, a cultural approach to understanding school violence has taken school violence beyond the realm of just criminal and physical acts of violence. These scholars have begun to examine verbal, emotional, sexual, and racial expressions violence, as well as violence that is perpetuated by institutions, what Bourdieu has called symbolic violence. Courses that take this perspective explore how cultural concepts, or what Swidler calls a 'cultural toolkit', can be used as a lens for analyzing the experiences and practices of school violence. This can include, for example, an examination of how the dominant American ideology of meritocracy and competition can foster fights between middle school students, or how a feminine identity might push girls to be relationally aggressive towards each other rather than physically aggressive. In this regard, cultural sociology broadens our understanding of what constitutes school violence to uncover a wide spectrum of behaviors, attitudes and beliefs that may indeed lead to more overt expressions of violence. In doing so, a cultural approach can also help educators rethink discipline policies that have been created to resolve this social problem.
Qualitative Sociology, 2013
ethnic violence, a type of school violence, he claims early on in the book, that is far more dest... more ethnic violence, a type of school violence, he claims early on in the book, that is far more destructive than other forms of school, yet vastly understudied and understood. Burning Dislike sets itself methodologically apart from research on violence that tends to rely on survey and interview data and instead utilizes participant observation to analyze the processes that precipitate, involve, and eventually resolve violent behavior. Sánchez-Jankowski thoughtfully uses the analogy of a fire to outline the trajectory of ethnic violence, from kindling, to sparks and smoke, to fire and embers. Firmly grounding his analysis in Donald Horowitz's macroanalysis of ethnic conflict and Randall Collins's microanalysis of the conditions that lead to a "forward panic" of emotional violent behavior, Sánchez-Jankowski takes this a step further by carefully examining patterns that slowly emerge in complex, rational, and strategic ways as ethnic diversity is introduced in disruptive ways into areas with scarce educational and economic resources. Stereotypes and prejudices predate the African-American students' arrival to mainly Irish
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy
Paulo Freire's classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), provides a radical critiqu... more Paulo Freire's classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), provides a radical critique of banking education and pedagogical authoritarianism, where teachers merely "deposit" knowledge into passive students. Instead, Freire argues for education to be the practice of freedom, a space of reciprocity and dialogue, where problem-posing education creates a site of mutual engagement in the production of knowledge striving for the "emergence of consciousness and critical intervention of reality" (1970, p. 81). As he discusses in his later work, Education for Critical Consciousness (1974), this type of critical pedagogy is one that is "…oriented toward research instead of repeating irrelevant principles. An education of 'I wonder, ' instead of merely, 'I do'" (1974, p. 32). As Riasati and Mollaei (2012) suggest, this involves a reflection upon one's lived experience and, "[a] development of voice through a critical look at one's world and society, which takes place in dialogue with others" (p. 224).
Youth Amp Society, Dec 1, 2011
This article uses a race-class-gender intersectional approach to analyze qualitative interviews w... more This article uses a race-class-gender intersectional approach to analyze qualitative interviews with girls at two public high schools to better understand a common perception that “girls are worse” when it comes to school fights. Several different understandings of why girls fight emerged from the data. On one hand, girls’ perception of face-to-face verbal fights seemed to uphold a normative hegemonic feminine ideology. Girls fought because they were overly emotional and dramatic, or they fought over boys, adhering to a heterosexual script that is consistent with normative femininity. Yet on the other hand, sometimes girls who engaged in fights were also seen as transgressing this hegemonic ideology. They fought because they were “tomboys” or “gay girls,” this latter perception reinforcing a type of homophobic name-calling that was pervasive at the school. Finally, girls who were involved in strictly face-to-face physical fights were often constructed as “ghetto girls,” which highlighted racist stereotypes about violence in these schools. In contrast, girls themselves who had admitted to being in a face-to-face fight seemed to offer an alternative understanding of fighting. They explained fighting as a site of situated agency, where fighting was justifiable in certain contexts, especially when used as an avenue for self-defense or to gain power and respect among their cohorts.
Sociology Compass, 2009
In terms of research on school violence, criminologists have dominated the field; yet, this work ... more In terms of research on school violence, criminologists have dominated the field; yet, this work has narrowly centered on crime as an indicator of violence. Although cultural sociologists have done noteworthy research on schooling and education, much of the focus has been on academic achievement. Yet, some cultural scholars have analyzed the expressions and practices of school violence, and in this paper, I argue that this approach reveals a rich, complex understanding of aggression and violence that is needed in sociological research on school violence. This includes looking at not only crime and more traditional, physical expression of violence, but also taking seriously verbal, emotion, sexual, or racial forms of violence, in addition to violence that is perpetuated by institutions. This paper reviews some of the more conventional studies on school violence and then looks at how cultural sociologists have begun to broaden this perspective. I use Swidler's ‘cultural toolkit’ as a framework for analyzing school violence, focusing on symbolic violence, cultural scripts, cultural resources and ideology as some of the cultural tools that prove useful to expanding our understanding of schooling and violence.
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2018
Dangerous fires do not break out from every spark. Whether a spark leads to nothing or creates a ... more Dangerous fires do not break out from every spark. Whether a spark leads to nothing or creates a raging wildfire depends greatly on the context, including the local ecology, the presence of kindling, the climate, the recent weather trends, and the prevailing winds. In Burning Dislike: Ethnic Violence in High Schools, Martı́n Sánchez-Jankowski uses this metaphor to craft a similar argument about racially motivated violence among high school students. Although it might be easy to simply attribute these bad incidents to bad young people, they are much better understood through their sociological context. Fortunately, readers can learn from the safety of their living rooms, because Sánchez-Jankowski spent five years in high schools observing individual violence, small group violence, brawls, riots, and stampedes. This superbly researched text includes the author’s initial findings on conflict between white and African American students in Boston from 1974 to 1976 along with his follow-up studies on conflict between Latino and African American students in Oakland and Los Angeles from 2000 to 2003. To better identify key factors that lead to ethnic violence, he selected different types of schools for observation: both middleand lower-class schools, and both schools that had already reported ethnic violence and schools that had not. Sánchez-Jankowski’s approach to data collection was relatively straightforward: he essentially wrote down everything he saw and heard, tape-recorded conversations, and carried a stopwatch to time the duration of incidents. He also verified any important details he missed with multiple independent witnesses. For the most part, however, he did not intervene in the violent incidents or report them to school officials or the police. Although, as the author himself acknowledges, this raises some ethical questions, none of the incidents he witnessed resulted in fatalities; and he suggests this approach significantly improved his ability to accurately study this social problem. Because students quickly learned that he would not get involved or report them, they were less likely to alter their behavior in his presence. Burning Dislike includes a large number of quotes from the students themselves, so it almost feels like they are speaking directly to readers—voicing their prejudices, fears, and anger. These quotes include the nasty slurs and stereotyping that ethnic conflict is often built on, which means they may simultaneously come across as both very offensive and very real. Sánchez-Jankowski uses these statements to shed light on what students think in various stages of the violence process, such as how their perceptions of other racial groups create a climate in which minor conflicts may quickly escalate and why their resistance to post-violence reconciliation may be particularly entrenched. He also does an excellent job in identifying thematic patterns across races, such as how white, black, and Latino students often make essentially the same types of arguments that can facilitate violence. For example, high school students of Irish American, African American, and Mexican American descent all pointed to suffering and adversity in their own cultural histories to justify their lack of empathy for the suffering of others. For scholars, an added benefit of these many quotes is that they offer a wealth of information for potential analysis beyond the scope of this book. Sánchez-Jankowski also presents thoughtprovoking tables and figures that document the duration of violent incidents and map the trajectory of school violence throughout the study periods. Although some school fights can be stopped in a matter of seconds, ethnic violence often lasts for a frighteningly long time. For example, one fight at Oakland’s Kaiser High school lasted fourteen minutes before the dominant assailant 216 Reviews
Social Sciences, 2017
Emerging adults are encountering a developmental stage in a polymediated world that brings autono... more Emerging adults are encountering a developmental stage in a polymediated world that brings autonomy, intimacy, and identity to the forefront of their transition from adolescence to adulthood. This study focuses on traditionally-aged college students who are deeply immersed with digital technology and communication as a primary method to communicate and interact with peers, partners, teachers, and family members. To understand the relationship between digital communication and emerging adulthood, researchers facilitated a qualitative study grounded in ethnomethodological and dramaturgical perspective to uncover the unique ways in which college students make sense of their social media during this developmental time period. Data collection occurred through nine focus groups; in all, 44 undergraduate students participated. Findings illustrate four relevant patterns to the development of emerging adults: a key rationale for use among participants that is tied to both ritualized behavior...
Sociological Studies of Children and Youth
I began my research at two suburban high schools in the spring of 2000, shortly after the one-yea... more I began my research at two suburban high schools in the spring of 2000, shortly after the one-year “anniversary” of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado. On April 20, 1999, Dylan Kelbold and Eric Harris entered their school and killed 10 classmates and 1 teacher, wounded 23 others, and then took their own lives in the library. It was the worst mass murder ever to take place on school grounds in the United States. I was particularly interested in looking at suburban schools during this time period because statistics showed juvenile crime, and in particular violence within the school systems, was on the decline, yet the perception of school violence seemed unrelated to these statistics (Brooks, Schiraldi, & Ziegenberg, 2000; Cook, 2000; Glassner, 1999). Following the widespread national attention given to the Columbine shootings,1 public polls showed 71% of Americans believed a school shooting was likely to happen in their community (Brooks et al., 2000). A month after the Columbine shootings, a Gallup Poll found 52% of parents still feared for their children's safety at school (Brooks et al., 2000). I was interested in learning how this perception of violence and fear shaped the everyday lives of kids going to schools throughout the United States. I wanted to know how schools dealt with issues of violence and safety at the local level, and in particular, how discipline and punishment was thought about, practiced, and negotiated within public-school settings.
Communication and Information Technologies Annual, 2014
Research limitations/implications Future research should move beyond print media to examine how T... more Research limitations/implications Future research should move beyond print media to examine how TV, popular culture, and social media sites construct this problem. This should include research on the public’s understanding and interpretation of these mediated forms of communication.
This is a multi-method qualitative study of how youth understand Columbine, school and youth viol... more This is a multi-method qualitative study of how youth understand Columbine, school and youth violence, and school safety in relationship to perspectives that are presented in the mainstream media and by school officials. This work centers kids\u27 discourses and pays close attention to the struggles that youth at two public high schools identify and prioritize, expanding work within the interpretive and social constructionist perspectives. It further challenges the homogeneity of youth by analyzing the talk of teens as intersecting with larger spheres of race, class, gender and sexuality, utilizing intersectional theory to analyze youth and violence. This dissertation problematizes the nation\u27s focus on Columbine by examining the multiple and diverse perceptions that youth have of school violence. Race and social class are central to how they negotiate the significance, or lack of significance, of Columbine in their daily lives. Additionally, this project expands the focus on weapons-related school violence by analyzing how youth experience daily forms of hidden violence, from harassment to bullying to discrimination, that are both pervasive and damaging to their lives. These forms of violence often get played out in verbal and physical fights. For boys, fights often are about maintaining a sense of power over others or sustaining a rigid form of masculinity that is rooted in aggression, violence and heterosexuality. Although girls often utilize fights as a way to transgress traditional feminine roles and maintain power, they are also often about self-defense, gaining respect, or maintaining a sense of popularity at the school. Although school policies and mechanisms of surveillance attempt to deal with such issues, consequences are inconsistent, particularly when schools lack stability and resources. Additionally, punitive forms of getting rid of kids to solve violence often works to sustain violence rather than prevent it. I argue that in order to create safe schools, the continuum of violence must be incorporated into school policies and curriculum, and relationships between kids, school officials, counselors and teachers must be given more priority than punitive consequences or additional mechanisms of surveillance, such as video cameras and metal detectors
Humanity & Society, 2006
Doreen E. Martinez career has focused on cultural epistemology. Her interest in this area is born... more Doreen E. Martinez career has focused on cultural epistemology. Her interest in this area is borne out of her own mixed ancestry that is Mescalero Apache, Mexican and Pennsylvania Dutch. Her research and teaching commitments are focused on the meanings individuals and communities make of their cosmological understandings and cultural practices. She has completed over 13 years of work with U.S. Indigenous women and is especially interested in how culture is represented and practiced from original standpoints not merely in reflection or response to outside influences. Her interest in the Maasai project was to investigate these very concepts and issues e.g., culture, cosmology, and preservation within a transnational framework.
Sociology Compass, 2009
Author's introduction Although criminologists have long dominated the field of school violence re... more Author's introduction Although criminologists have long dominated the field of school violence research, there has been a growing body of research by cultural sociologists in this area as well. In many ways, a cultural approach to understanding school violence has taken school violence beyond the realm of just criminal and physical acts of violence. These scholars have begun to examine verbal, emotional, sexual, and racial expressions violence, as well as violence that is perpetuated by institutions, what Bourdieu has called symbolic violence. Courses that take this perspective explore how cultural concepts, or what Swidler calls a 'cultural toolkit', can be used as a lens for analyzing the experiences and practices of school violence. This can include, for example, an examination of how the dominant American ideology of meritocracy and competition can foster fights between middle school students, or how a feminine identity might push girls to be relationally aggressive towards each other rather than physically aggressive. In this regard, cultural sociology broadens our understanding of what constitutes school violence to uncover a wide spectrum of behaviors, attitudes and beliefs that may indeed lead to more overt expressions of violence. In doing so, a cultural approach can also help educators rethink discipline policies that have been created to resolve this social problem.
Qualitative Sociology, 2013
ethnic violence, a type of school violence, he claims early on in the book, that is far more dest... more ethnic violence, a type of school violence, he claims early on in the book, that is far more destructive than other forms of school, yet vastly understudied and understood. Burning Dislike sets itself methodologically apart from research on violence that tends to rely on survey and interview data and instead utilizes participant observation to analyze the processes that precipitate, involve, and eventually resolve violent behavior. Sánchez-Jankowski thoughtfully uses the analogy of a fire to outline the trajectory of ethnic violence, from kindling, to sparks and smoke, to fire and embers. Firmly grounding his analysis in Donald Horowitz's macroanalysis of ethnic conflict and Randall Collins's microanalysis of the conditions that lead to a "forward panic" of emotional violent behavior, Sánchez-Jankowski takes this a step further by carefully examining patterns that slowly emerge in complex, rational, and strategic ways as ethnic diversity is introduced in disruptive ways into areas with scarce educational and economic resources. Stereotypes and prejudices predate the African-American students' arrival to mainly Irish
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy
Paulo Freire's classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), provides a radical critiqu... more Paulo Freire's classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), provides a radical critique of banking education and pedagogical authoritarianism, where teachers merely "deposit" knowledge into passive students. Instead, Freire argues for education to be the practice of freedom, a space of reciprocity and dialogue, where problem-posing education creates a site of mutual engagement in the production of knowledge striving for the "emergence of consciousness and critical intervention of reality" (1970, p. 81). As he discusses in his later work, Education for Critical Consciousness (1974), this type of critical pedagogy is one that is "…oriented toward research instead of repeating irrelevant principles. An education of 'I wonder, ' instead of merely, 'I do'" (1974, p. 32). As Riasati and Mollaei (2012) suggest, this involves a reflection upon one's lived experience and, "[a] development of voice through a critical look at one's world and society, which takes place in dialogue with others" (p. 224).
Youth Amp Society, Dec 1, 2011
This article uses a race-class-gender intersectional approach to analyze qualitative interviews w... more This article uses a race-class-gender intersectional approach to analyze qualitative interviews with girls at two public high schools to better understand a common perception that “girls are worse” when it comes to school fights. Several different understandings of why girls fight emerged from the data. On one hand, girls’ perception of face-to-face verbal fights seemed to uphold a normative hegemonic feminine ideology. Girls fought because they were overly emotional and dramatic, or they fought over boys, adhering to a heterosexual script that is consistent with normative femininity. Yet on the other hand, sometimes girls who engaged in fights were also seen as transgressing this hegemonic ideology. They fought because they were “tomboys” or “gay girls,” this latter perception reinforcing a type of homophobic name-calling that was pervasive at the school. Finally, girls who were involved in strictly face-to-face physical fights were often constructed as “ghetto girls,” which highlighted racist stereotypes about violence in these schools. In contrast, girls themselves who had admitted to being in a face-to-face fight seemed to offer an alternative understanding of fighting. They explained fighting as a site of situated agency, where fighting was justifiable in certain contexts, especially when used as an avenue for self-defense or to gain power and respect among their cohorts.
Sociology Compass, 2009
In terms of research on school violence, criminologists have dominated the field; yet, this work ... more In terms of research on school violence, criminologists have dominated the field; yet, this work has narrowly centered on crime as an indicator of violence. Although cultural sociologists have done noteworthy research on schooling and education, much of the focus has been on academic achievement. Yet, some cultural scholars have analyzed the expressions and practices of school violence, and in this paper, I argue that this approach reveals a rich, complex understanding of aggression and violence that is needed in sociological research on school violence. This includes looking at not only crime and more traditional, physical expression of violence, but also taking seriously verbal, emotion, sexual, or racial forms of violence, in addition to violence that is perpetuated by institutions. This paper reviews some of the more conventional studies on school violence and then looks at how cultural sociologists have begun to broaden this perspective. I use Swidler's ‘cultural toolkit’ as a framework for analyzing school violence, focusing on symbolic violence, cultural scripts, cultural resources and ideology as some of the cultural tools that prove useful to expanding our understanding of schooling and violence.