Care, Community, and Segregation: Race, Class, Property, and Rights in the Afterlife of Gentrification

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

This project follows from an earlier study on school choice, the findings of which demonstrate that: 1) the post-Brown structuring of universal rights as individual and private choices within the realm of the public, has ensured that diversity, segregation, and choice are joined together by design; and 2) choice has ensured the continued structuring of a tiered or unequal citizenship, despite the wealth of knowledge, immeasurable care, and high aspirations for achievement that low-income mothers of color hold for their children. My research employs ethnographic methods and focuses on one school district in New York City, which is among the most racially and economically diverse and yet, is also the most segregated and unequal school district in the nation’s largest school system. Admissions to charter and non-charter public schools in the district are heavily guided by choice-based policies. Within the district, despite gentrification, low-income families remain, due in large part to the significant public housing stock. My new research examines the contentious re-zoning battles that emerged in the same district in 2015, following the post financial crisis “tip in” of middle class families to public schools. Decidedly dictating these contestations are reoccurring references---made by those on each side of the fight---to key terms: community, family, and rights. This study queries what these fights tell us about new political subjectivities, divergent urban imaginaries, and the production and organization of urban space. More specifically, this study asks: in the afterlife of gentrification, as parents of different backgrounds increasingly encounter one another to negotiate the shared resource of public schools, what definitions of community, kin networks, and rights are developed, negotiated, and produced? What affective registers of parental care are mobilized---and by whom---in making claims to public sector goods such as public education and more broadly, to urban space?

Author

• Ujju Aggarwal, Graduate Center of the City University of New York