Author: Eric Margolis

In this article, Eric Margolis and Michael Soldatenko trace a significant transformation in American progressive politics: the shift from broad-based internationalist movements that sought to address structural inequality to identity-based politics organized around particular group experiences of oppression. The authors argue that while identity politics has brought vital issues of recognition and representation to the forefront, it has also fragmented the coalitions needed to challenge systemic economic and political power.

Drawing on their experience as scholars and participants in movements for social change, Margolis and Soldatenko examine how the transition from “our oppression” to “my oppression” reshaped academic discourse, political organizing, and the possibilities for solidarity across difference. The analysis is grounded in the specific history of Chicano/a studies and ethnic studies programs, where these tensions have played out with particular intensity.

The article does not simply mourn the decline of internationalism or celebrate the rise of identity politics, but rather attempts to understand the structural and historical forces that drove the shift — and to ask whether a new synthesis might be possible that honors both the universalist aspirations of earlier movements and the particularist insights of contemporary scholarship.

Published in Critical Sociology, this article engages with one of the most consequential debates in contemporary progressive thought.

This article was downloaded by: [Sheila Fram] On: 24 October 2011, At: 06:54 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

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Architectural and built environment discourses in an educational context: the Gottscho and Schleisner Collection Sheila Fram & Eric Margolis Available online: 21 Oct 2011

This article examines how surveillance, discipline, and punishment have been inscribed on the bodies of schoolchildren throughout history. Drawing on historical photographs and visual ethnographic methods, Margolis and Fram analyze the ways schools have used physical control and monitoring to regulate student behavior, revealing patterns that persist across decades of American education.

The research reveals how photographic evidence captures moments of institutional power exercised over children’s bodies — from dress codes and physical positioning to more overt forms of discipline — illuminating the hidden curriculum of bodily control in educational settings. By reading these images against the grain, the authors uncover how schools function as sites where docile bodies are produced through routine practices of observation and correction.

Margolis and Fram situate their analysis within broader debates about the relationship between visual culture and institutional authority. The photographs examined in this study — drawn from school archives, yearbooks, and documentary collections — serve as both evidence of disciplinary practices and as instruments of surveillance themselves. The camera’s presence in schools, the authors argue, is never neutral; it participates in the very power dynamics it records.

The article contributes to the growing field of visual sociology by demonstrating how historical photographs can be used as primary sources for understanding the embodied dimensions of educational experience. It challenges readers to look beyond the surface of familiar school imagery and recognize the disciplinary apparatus embedded in everyday scenes of classroom life.

Images of the places and activities called “school” as a formal institution are rich data for the inquiring gaze. This article

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States government established a network of boarding schools designed to assimilate Native American children into white American culture. In this article, Eric Margolis and Jeremy Rowe examine photographs from these Arizona schools to reveal how the visual record both documented and participated in the project of cultural erasure.

The photographs follow a striking pattern: “before and after” images show children transformed from their traditional appearance into uniformed students with cropped hair and Western clothing. Margolis and Rowe argue that these images were not neutral records but deliberate propaganda — produced to demonstrate the “success” of assimilation programs to government officials, philanthropic donors, and the general public.

Yet the same photographs, read against the grain, reveal what the original photographers did not intend to show: the resistance in children’s eyes, the persistence of cultural identity despite institutional pressure, and the physical conditions of schools that were often overcrowded, underfunded, and harsh. The article demonstrates how visual analysis can recover suppressed narratives from within the very images that were designed to erase them.

Published in History of Education, this article contributes to the growing body of scholarship that uses visual evidence to re-examine the history of Indigenous education in America.