State Experiments on the Black Body Politic: Building and Contesting Educational Neoliberalization in Detroit

• In Event: 26.022 - Identity and Spatial Restructuring: Transnational Hopes/Local Realities

Abstract

Urban education studies has gained its analytical strength from critical race theory, the sociology of education, various forms of class analysis, feminist analysis, the governmentality school, and research on social, linguistic, and cultural capital, among other fields. Yet with rare exception, urban education studies has left behind its primary referent—the city—at a time when multidisciplinary studies of the city have been among the most generative sources of innovative analysis.
By drawing on the analysis of education policy documents and ethnographic work in Detroit, I demonstrate how urban education studies might augment its vibrancy and analytical capacity through a rigorous engagement with these new strands that locate the city and the urban as primary nodes of analysis.

Author

• Thomas C. Pedroni, Wayne State University