Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of "Freeway" in her 1990 book, Working Class Without
Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class
folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This
time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling
to survive the challenges of the global economy.
Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight
into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might
be for the future.
Table of Contents
Part I: 1985
1. A Time of Pain: Young Men at Freeway High
2. A Time of Possibility: Young Women at Freeway High
Part II: 2000
3. We Meet the Men Again
4. And the Beat Goes On: Those Men Who Stay
5. Revisiting a "Moment of Critique": Freeway Girls All Grown Up
6. Picking up the Pieces and Moving Forward
7. Beyond the Shadow of the Mills: Men, Women, Whiteness and the New Economy
Theoretical Coda
Epilogue: Methods and Reflections
Notes