Teaching Double Negatives: Disadvantage and Dissent at Community College asks whether exploring narratives that subvert dominant Western paradigms of progress in classrooms enables students to re-narrate and represent their lives. In seven years of teaching literature and philosophy at Brooklyn's only community college, Robert Cowan worked with many kinds of disadvantaged students-those on welfare or homeless, single moms and the formerly incarcerated, traumatized war veterans, and immigrants from over 140 countries. These students had many reasons for wanting to dissent from the social norms...