7 Quotes by Teo You Yenn

The piece was about some of the challenges low-income parents face, about how they care greatly for their children, & about how they have poor options rather than make poor choices.

What we do & do not do are shaped by our sense of how others are - shared understanding of right & wrong, good & bad, valuable & worthless.

To study poverty without inequality leads to tendencies to misrecognize structural issues for individual failings. On the other hand, to study inequality without poverty, particularly through focus only on trends and numbers, is to allow for research devoid of humanity insofar as we merely cite phenomenon without naming the injustices as enacted on real persons.

I have spent many years of my research life talking about how people have limited agency - that we make choices & live lives in specific conditions in which we have little control. This is a fundamental starting point for sociologists. But after my friend finished speaking, I reminded him: that's a great analogy, but there are important differences. The laws of physics do not care for considered action. Molecules, atoms, gravity, force - these are not moral actors. But we are.

To confront inequality is to confront this incoherent ideology, & ultimately to confront ourselves, our incoherent selves.

So much about being a woman who's had the good fortune to be offered some choices, and yet not good enough fortune to live in a world with gender equality, is about giving up some of what we want and making peace with not "having it all". Many women give up dreams and ideals as they patch together careers, marriage, children. My career-centrered path should not be read as a rejection of the domestic and care aspects of life.

By virtue of rewarding precocity - expecting kids to be able to read and write when they begin Primary 1, for example - the school system values its role in sorting ahead of its role in teaching.