Call for papers: Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, D.C., April 3-7, 2019
Session title: Critical Geographies of Education: Schooling, Power, and the Production of Space
Organizers: Dan Cohen (University of British Columbia), Alice Huff (UCLA), Nicole Nguyen (University of Illinois-Chicago)
Schools are sites of social reproduction; they have been implicated in geographic processes of neoliberalization, gentrification, social stratification, segregation, as well as other forms of violence and exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and immigration status. And yet, schooling arrangements also have the capacity to anchor communities, unsettle existing orders and produce more democratic possibilities. In response, people continue to fight for control over schools even as they seek to change how they operate in and on communities (The Movement for Black Lives, 2016; Huff, 2013; Kearns, Lewis, McCreanor, & Witten, 2009). Globally, recent struggles over schooling demonstrate that education is a deeply geographic and urgently political endeavor across contexts. The relationship between schooling, power, and the production of space is evident in community-led protests over selective school closures that disproportionately impact Black and Brown neighborhoods in the U.S., and efforts to organize for more authentic community control over the education of youth (Good, 2017; Gutierrez and Lipman, 2013). It becomes visible in educator and student action groups aimed at resisting marketization and militarization from Puerto Rico to South Africa (Buras, 2015; Harding and Kershner 2011).
Geographers have articulated many compelling connections between geographies of education and other more established geographic conversations (Butler, Hamnett, & Ramsden, 2013; Holloway, Brown, & Pimlott-Wilson, 2011; McCreary, Basu, & Godlewska, 2013; Nguyen, Cohen, & Huff, 2017). But there is still much room for exploration, especially for those interested in how a more cohesive critical geographies of education subfield might cultivate its own internal lines of inquiry through interaction with those who identify as education geographers, schooling activists, and others whose work intersects with education. Aimed at building this cohesive subfield, we invite papers that that attend to how geographic ordering systems (such as racism, sexism, and colonialism) shape and are shaped by contemporary education arrangements, and to how these relationships are challenged. We especially welcome papers that attend to the centrality of education in struggles of freedom, justice, and self-determination.
Potential areas of inquiry might include (but are not limited to):
- The relationship between broader social movements (e.g., Black Youth Project 100 and Black Lives Matter) and efforts to contest and/or reimagine schooling arrangements.
- Interlocking mechanisms of racism and neoliberalism in relation to education and the politics of place.
- How social processes central to geographic inquiry are shaped by, and shape, schools (e.g., citizenship, gentrification, placemaking).
- Schools as sites of social reproduction and the reproduction and/or contestation of dominant logics.
- Education policy/reform and possibilities for new forms of collective action.
- International/comparative perspectives on critical geographies of education.
Please submit paper abstracts to [log in to unmask] no later than October 10, 2018
References
Basu, R. (2004). A Flyvbjergian perspective of public elementary school closures in Toronto: A question of “rationality” or “power”? Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 22(3), 423–451.
Buras, K. L. (2015). Charter schools, race, and urban space: Where the market meets grassroots resistance. New York: Routledge.
Butler, T., Hamnett, C., & Ramsden, M. J. (2013). Gentrification, education and exclusionary displacement in East London. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(2), 556–575.
Good, R. M. (2017). Histories that root us: Neighborhood, place, and the protest of school closures in Philadelphia. Urban Geography, 38(6), 861-883.
Gutierrez, R. R., & Lipman, P. (2013). Dyett High School & the 3 Ds of Chicago school reform: Destabalization, disinvestment, and disenfranchisement. Chicago, IL. Retrieved from http://ceje.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Fact-Sheet-Dyett1.pdf
Harding, S., & Kershner, S. (2011). Just Say No: Organizing against Militarism in Public Schools. J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare, 38, 79.
Holloway, S. L., Brown, G., & Pimlott-Wilson, H. (2011). Editorial introduction: Geographies of education and aspiration. Children’s Geographies, 9(1), 1–5.
Huff, A. (2013). Reforming the city: Neoliberal school reform and democratic contestation in New Orleans. The Canadian Geographer, 57(3), 311–317.
Kearns, R. A., Lewis, N., McCreanor, T., & Witten, K. (2009). “The status quo is not an option”: Community impacts of school closure in South Taranaki, New Zealand. Journal of Rural Studies, 25(1), 131–140.
Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. New York: Routledge.
McCreary, T., Basu, R., & Godlewska, A. (2013). Critical geographies of education: Introduction to the special issue. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 57(3), 255-259.
Nguyen, Nicole, Dan Cohen, and Alice Huff. "Catching the bus: A call for critical geographies of education." Geography Compass 11, no. 8 (2017): e12323.
The Movement for Black Lives (2016). Community control of schools policy brief. Accessed online (August 19, 2016) at: https://policy.m4bl.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Community-Control-of-Schools-Policy-Brief.p
Witten, K., Kearns, R. A., Lewis, N., & McCreanor, T. (2003). Educational restructuring from a community viewpoint: a case study of school closure from Invercargill, New Zealand. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 21(2), 202–223.
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