- Department:
- Department of Sociology
- Campus:
- IU Bloomington
The Hidden Health Costs of Educational and Family Inequality for Youth of Color
Dr. Hyeyoung Kwon seeks to rethink the relationship between work, family, and childhood by centering the experiences of low-income, immigrant, and racially minoritized youth who navigate schooling alongside the reproductive and economic labor required to sustain their families’ well-being. Building on sociological and feminist scholarship that has long documented how women struggle to reconcile care work with the “ideal worker” norm, this study seeks to develop and interrogate what Kwon terms the “ideal student,” an implicit institutional model that assumes young people are free from caregiving responsibilities and constantly available for schoolwork. By examining how seemingly neutral school practices are organized around an idealized image of the student, this project aims to clarify how educational institutions may systematically privilege youth whose families are better positioned to meet dominant school expectations.