Dear all,
Please see the reminder below of the call for papers for the Changing cities, changing schools? session of the RGS-IBG conference 2014. Apologies for any cross-posting.
Best wishes,
Sol Gamsu
PhD Student in Geography
King's College London
http://kcl.academia.edu/SolGamsu
Twitter: @SolGamsu
Changing cities, changing schools? Education, inequality and class in twenty-first century cities.
Session organizers: Sol Gamsu (King’s College London) Julia
Nast (Humboldt University, Berlin/King’s College London).
Session sponsor: Urban Geography Research Group
Deadline for abstracts: February 4th 2014 (deadline may be extended but please aim for Monday if possible).
Across both the global South and North, urban education systems have borne the brunt of neoliberal reforms. This has re-shaped schooling as a form of urban governance, with schools increasingly marketized with
little local accountability. These reforms, however, have done little to challenge long-standing patterns of social reproduction through schooling. From Santiago de Chile to London, the presence of elite, upper-middle class schools in the suburbs remains.
In inner-city areas, gentrification both pre-dates and has been exacerbated by the liberalization of school choice. In Chicago, Vancouver and London there is evidence of displacement of working-class and ethnic-minority inhabitants and early gentrifiers as
competition for a small number of ‘acceptable’ middle-class state schools intensifies. However, there are risks in focusing purely on the (white) middle-classes and the forces of capital accumulation. Although still constrained and marginalized in urban housing
and jobs markets and schools, particular class fractions and certain ethnic minorities are gaining limited agency and are ‘succeeding’ educationally. Moving to the suburbs as an educational strategy is no longer the preserve of the white middle-classes with
processes of ethnic/racial residential change challenging earlier models of suburban education. In both London and Amsterdam, ethnic-minority students have been the agents of substantial increases in school attainment in ‘inner-city’, ‘urban’ schools. These
new processes underline the need to understand urban change through schooling in ways which both account for market-oriented reform, continued older forms of social reproduction
and the development of new aspiring ‘middle class’ fractions amongst formerly marginalized groups.
For this session we welcome papers which examine either new processes of change or the continuation of earlier patterns (or both) with the hope of synthesizing these contrasting tendencies in urban school systems.
We also join recent scholarship across the globe which seeks to put education at the heart of understanding urban change. Furthermore, these new patterns of urban schooling are allowing schools, parents and students to create new forms of knowledge about education.
We invite papers addressing methodological questions involved in this co-production of knowledge. Research on urban schooling is, by necessity, often produced in collaboration with the school as well as with communities whose perspectives are often not heard,
and we welcome papers examining the tensions arising from this. Co-production of knowledge in educational contexts requires innovative methodological approaches and novel forms of exchange between researchers and educational actors.
This will be a papers session with an open call. We are looking for at least 4papers, 20 minutes long, including 5 minutes of questions for each paper and a final discussion of 20 minutes. If possible there will
be a second session for 4 additional papers and/or there will be distributed papers. We would like to use the session as a springboard for a special issue (Journal to be confirmed).
