Negotiating Tensions: Grassroots Organizing, School Reform, and the Paradox of Neoliberal Democracy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 53
  In Roundtable Session: Political Organizing and In/Ex-clusions

Abstract

This paper examines a grassroots community-based organization (CBO) that organized Latina/o immigrant parents in a large, high-poverty, racially- and linguistically-diverse, urban school district. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork, it explores ideological tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas that emerged as organizers engaged with and attempted to navigate the imperatives of neoliberal education reform and the broader neoliberal policy context. Applying insights from the literature on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it shows how organizers exercised agency, but also how the neoliberalization of education and CBOs constrained their agency. It argues that community organizing for school reform can contribute to increased educational neoliberalization, and to neoliberal notions of democracy that, paradoxically, employ frames of symbolic inclusion and processes of material exclusion (Miraftab 2004).

Author

• Kysa Nygreen, University of Massachusetts - Amherst