Weis and Fine Post (Make Up)

It took me a couple of tries to begin to understand the terms and main ideas in the essay "Critical Bifocality and Circuits of Privelage: Expanding Critical Ethnographic Theory and Design" by Lois Weis and Michelle Fine. I wasnt able to form an opinion until about page five, when Weis and Fina paraphrase Gloria Ladson Billings, essentially saying that inequality gaps in education are a call for investigation into the relationship between deficit and privelage. Weis and Fine look at the effects of the global sphere on local spaces and are interested in how, and why the elevation of one sector leads to the plight of another.  They say "we want to encourage designs that trace how widening inequaltiy gaps penetrate lives and ... how the accumulation of privelage is implicated in the deepening of poverty" ( Weis and  Fine 5) .

I am not confident in my definition of critical bifocality but I think it is the action of what I described above- making  close observations and critiques of the way structures are built and who they affect. It is interesting to then apply this to humans and the college application process as Weis and Fine do. The addtion of parent involvement in college acceptance  definately furthers the gap between familes with low cultural capital. It means a brilliant and qualified applicant with parents who may not be fluent in the college application process for any reason are at a disadvantage compared to a student's culutral capital doubled by their college savvy parents.  Weis and Fine refferd to the middle class as insecure and emmersing themselves into their children's education because of outsourced white collar jobs , further connecting the affects of globalization on youth and their educational descrepencies.