Dr. Fine is a professor in the Social/Personality Psychology Program, GSUC/CUNY and previously taught for 12 years at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research program surrounds questions of community development with a particular emphasis on urban youth and young adults. She is working on projects funded by the Spencer Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, both of which focus on the "spaces" created for and by youth in which political, spiritual and/or recuperative work is pursued. She and her colleagues, such as Lois Weis at SUNY-Buffalo, Linda Powell at Teachers College, Columbia University and students from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, are interested in understanding life within such spaces; that is, political life of the group and the personal development of the individuals so engaged. The "space" in which we are located includes those designed explicitly to be diverse and democratic (e.g an integrated World Literature classroom, a complex of new, small, community-based public schools, and an arts center in Buffalo, New York); those designed explicitly to be segregated and activist (a Black church; an ethnic immigration center; a youth group for black adolescent males living in public housing; programs designed explicitly for adolescent female activists) and those designed to be richly recuperative and supportive for politically marginalized young men and women and sometimes for elites (lesbian/gay community center; a teen mother's school-based group). In these spaces, questions are raised about identity, critical consciousness within and beyond the group, the relation of critique and social action and the impact of external surveillance in individual and group life. Beyond these spaces, she is interested in understanding the relations between these corners of social possibility and larger movements for social change.
Her recent books include:
The Unknown City (with L. Weiss, 1990), Becoming
Gentlemen (with L. Guinier & J. Balin, 1997),
Off-White: Readings on Society, Race, and Culture, (with L.
Powell, L. Weiss, & M. Wong, 1996, Charting Urban School
Reform: Reflections on Public High Schools in the midst of
change (1994), Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race and
Gender in American Schools (1992), Disruptive Voices: The
Transgressive Possibilities of Feminist Research (1992), and
Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban High
School (1991). She has provided courtroom expert testimony for
cases including Anthony T. Lee et. al & the United States of
America, & the National Education Association, Inc. V. Macon
County Board of Education; Shannon Richey Faulkner & the
United States of America V. James E. Jones et. al for The Citadel,
The Military College of South Carolina; Ulcena V. Board of
Education of the Borough of Tenafly. She was been awarded the
Janet Helms Distinguished Scholar Award (1994), and a Spencer
Foundation National Mentoring Award (1998).