Discourse Wars in Gotham-West1999

In Discourse Wars in Gotham-West, Marc Pruyn paints a multi-layered and textured picture of a year-long critical ethnography he conducted of a community-based, Freirean-inspired adult Spanish literacy classroom against the postmodern backdrop of urban, working class Los Angeles. Pruyn engagingly draws us into the lives of one group of adult Latina/o learners recently immigrated as refugees from Central America and Mexico who sought to develop their native language literacy skills. At the center of his detailed study are analyses from critical pedagogy. Foucauldian & poststructuralist thought, Gramscian neo-Marxism, and critical discourse analysis. This work is sure to be of much use to students and scholars in the fields of critical pedagogy, discourse analysis, linguistics, urban studies, immigrant studies and radical social theory.