Review of Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom, by Ranita Ray
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14507/er.v33.4684Abstract
The heart of this book is an unwavering showing of “slow violence,” and there is something for scholars across several research domains. As a study of schools, Slow Violence is grounded in the quotidian of student-teacher relations. Professor Ray offers social psychologists a brilliant study of affect, shame as social control, role identities, social exchange, and identity destruction. Slow Violence is also an examination of how institutional pressures and organizational cultures can be harmful. Researchers dedicated to the study and uprooting of racism could read Slow Violence as a race-forward book.
Author Biography
Michael L. Walker, University of Minnesota
Michael L. Walker earned his PhD in 2014 from the University of California-Riverside and joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2017 where he is the Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts. His research focuses on social psychological patterns in organizations—especially with respect to race, ethnicity, identities, emotions, social exchange, and time as an organizing principle. In trying to understand social life from the viewpoint of others and explaining patterns of social behavior, he mixes ethnography with interviewing and observation to produce research that is theory forward and unironically emotional. He is the author of Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail, which examines the organizational pressures and socioemotional landscape of jail time from the viewpoint of penal residents. Indefinite won the 2022 C. Wright Mills Award and the 2022 Charles Horton Cooley Award. His current book project weaves memoir into interviews and participant observation with members of a large midwestern law enforcement agency to examine the emotional landscape of policing, how organizational cloistering can shape nightmares, the problem of police-public trust, and politically charged perceptions of race relations in police work.
References
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Ray, R. (2018). The making of a teenage service class: Poverty and mobility in an American city. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520292055.001.0001
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[Book reviewed] Ray, R. (2025). Slow violence: Confronting dark truths in the American classroom. St. Martin's Press.
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