Call for papers: AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA
Session Title: Geographies of Education Restructuring and Teacher Union Activism in North America
Organizers: Paul Booking (York University) and Peter Brogan (York University)
Education scholars and geographers have in recent years been collaborating and developing a rich sub-field of education geography (Taylor 2009). With the spatial turn in Critical education scholarship researchers have typically approached their inquiries through a socio-temporal lens that draws on the works of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Pierre Bourdieu, Edward Soja, and others to expand the sociological study of education by insisting on the different ways in which “space matters” to the study of education. Geographers have described these spaces of education as, “rich subjects of critical geographical analysis,” especially as “neoliberal reforms… are transforming the spaces, subjectivities, and power relations of education” (McCreary et al. 2013, 255).
This session aims to elaborate a geographical analysis of recent attacks on public education, teachers and their unions throughout North America. In particular, we are interested in papers that focus on developing a spatialized political economic analysis of the policies of education restructuring and how teachers have been collectively fighting back against the destructive neoliberalization of education policy and practice, both through their unions and outside of them. Some of the questions that might be addressed in this session might include:
- What kind of theory and research practice is necessary to both understand and contest the neoliberalization of public education and the assault on teacher unions?
- How have the ideologies and politics of neoliberal education “reform,” on the one hand, and organizing models, strategies and tactics of resistance against such restructuring, on the other, evolved as they have travelled across space?
- How have the dynamics of these struggles varied from place to place depending on diverse local, regional and national contexts? Put another way, how does education policy, activist discourses and practices travel and get taken up in different places across Canada, the United States and Mexico?
- In what ways does race and racism figure into current educational reform policies and the remaking of urban space?
- What is the political ecology of neoliberal education policy-making in North America?
- In what ways does a critical geographical approach matter to grassroots struggles for education justice?
Submissions need not be limited to these suggestions; we welcome abstracts with expansive interpretations of these topics and themes.
Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Peter Brogan (pbrogan1@gmail.com) and Paul Bocking (paulbocking@gmail.com) by Monday, October 23rd, 2015. Selected abstracts will be accepted by October 25th. All participants must provide AAG PINs by October 28th.