An approach to addressing social problems that involves a holistic exploration of the causal feedback loops between stakeholders, their relationships, resource flows, rules, practices, mental models, and other elements of a system that all work together to produce a result; often in enabling or inhibiting the effects of a social problem. The work of identifying, examining, and interrogating these interconnected elements of a system is in service to devising leverage points, or minor interventions that can transform the system.
Published in Chapter:
Time of Our Lives: Reproducing Inequality in a Culture of Compulsory Progress
Josephine Ngo McKelvy (North Carolina State University, USA)
Copyright: © 2022
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-4128-2.ch004
Abstract
Drawing from interviews about lives that did not go as expected, the author argues that people reproduce inequality in friendship relationships by leaning into aspects of white supremacy culture and the American achievement ideology—namely, the desire for control, perfectionism, and individualism—when comparing the pace of their lives to those of their friends. Until participants could feel secure about where they were in life, these comparisons simmered competition, self-blame, resentment of peers, and isolation. Striving for these ideals also covertly protects the ideologies of dominant groups without having to name any systems of oppression or their beneficiaries. In the end, interview participants often reproduced (as much as they challenged) cultural understandings of a well-lived life, but one way to combat inequality is to transform expectations for compulsory progress.