Critical Bifocality

This chapter elaborates critical bifocality through two emblematic studies on the production and reproduction of privilege, and the shadows cast on institutions and communities of cumulative disinvestment. In employing critical bifocality, it opens up quandaries about how to document and theorize what is purposely designed to be unseen. The chapter then highlights the refractive implications of deep structural shifts in the global economy, and the ways in which aspects of the now global economy play out in the United States. It also highlights the stratification of tertiary-level educational institutions in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century US context. In so doing, the chapter deliberately theorizes how massive realignment at the global level has attendant consequences for the national and local level with regard to lived-out social and economic dynamics of individuals and collectivities.