Description: Volunteering is typically thought of as an act of altruism, yet there are power dynamics embedded in volunteer-service recipient relationships, especially when volunteers operate from privileged positions. Following six grassroots homeless service organizations in St. Louis, Missouri, Matthew Schneider unpacks the tensions between race, class, urban space, and volunteerism. Volunteers are well intentioned and provide vital, life-saving services. However, Serving the Street explores how many of these same volunteer groups helped to reproduce racialized stigma and stereotypes about poverty, homelessness, and marginal urban space through volunteer practices that bordered on "poverty tourism." If our goal is to make communities more inclusive and equitable, this book suggests a need for greater self-reflection, even among well-intentioned, social-justice-oriented volunteers.
Brief description: MATTHEW JEROME SCHNEIDER is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, a collaborating professor with the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center, and the codirector of the Sustainability, Equity, and Action Laboratory. Situated in the areas of race and racism, environmental sociology, urban sociology, and community and civic engagement, his work has appeared in numerous outlets including Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Forum, Radical Teacher, Environmental Justice, and Inside Higher Ed.
Review Quotes: Serving the Street is a richly researched ethnography that adds to the burgeoning studies that focus on how well-intentioned whiteness reproduces durable inequalities. The lessons learned here are valuable for social justice oriented individuals and groups in that it implicitly questions the degree to which white allies can participate in antiracist social movements or day-to-day action where whiteness is simultaneously invisible and omnipresent.--Daina Cheyenne Harvey "professor of sociology and anthropology, College of the Holy Cross"