All Are Created Unequal in the Eyes of the Market: Education Policy, Christian and Islamic Schooling, and the New Urban Spaces of Race

• In Event: Education and the Racialization of Neoliberal Urban Governance: A Critical Geography Approach to Multiple Urban Contexts

Abstract

Education policy has historically been, and continues to be, inscribed by and produces racialized spaces in urban education. Far from ameliorating inequities, education policy supporting markets and school choice often eviscerates possibilities to eradicate and, indeed, concretizes race/racism. That is, there is an increasing disregard shown for racialized inequities as education systems become dominated by neo-liberal market-driven concerns (Gillborn, 2008; Gulson, 2011 ). These concerns in education converge with urban policy directions that enable and consolidate gentrification and privatization of public spaces. At times, thus, education policy needs to be considered not as parallel to urban policy, but as a central component of the policy assemblage of the city.

This paper draws on data generated through a qualitative project looking at public discourses, geographies of fear and religious schooling, in Sydney, Australia. The paper looks at education policy directions that support markets and school choice in relation to religious schooling, specifically Islamic schools and Pentecostal Christian schools. This paper tries to understand these educational policy directions pertaining to markets through a framework of race and urban space. Specifically, this paper explores the links between race, education policy and religious schooling provision, through reference to an assemblage of theories of space from social and cultural geography, and aspects of critical theories of race, including critical whiteness studies (Dwyer & Jones III, 2000; Goldberg, 2009; Leonardo, 2009; Massey, 2005). These theories are brought together to argue that the connections between education policy and race/ racism can be understood through identifying historic and geographic specificities, in which theorizing about race is also, in part, theorizing about urban spaces and places (Gulson, 2011).

This paper examines how ‘new’ urban spaces of race/ racism, and the politics of the city, are played out in relation to and inscribed by these education policy directions. Specifically, the paper will identify discrepancies in marketized racializations pertaining to the establishment of Islamic schools and ‘new’ Christian schools, and the connections to geographies of race/ racism and white multiculturalism. Islamic and Christian schools are established in different parts of the city, and enter into different types of highly contested and often vituperative racialized, urban politics. The establishment of these schools highlights how educational policy initiatives become constituted as contests over the demarcation of place and the right to belong in the city. This paper will argue, therefore, that seeing education as a key constitutive factor in imagining the city means focusing on the following key issues: the racialization of religion in multicultural nations; the links between market mechanisms and the articulations of difference in the city; and the racialized transnational imaginaries that pervade the terrains of religious schooling provision in cities like Sydney.

Author

• Kalervo N. Gulson, University of New South Wales