"Now They’re Coming After Our Schools": Interrogating Urban Intimacies of Children and Displacement

• In Event: 18.023 - Multimodal Approaches to Exploring Gentrification and Schools: Real Estate, Experiences, and School Community Transitions

Abstract

The education literature of gentrification generally focuses on the gentrifying school (e.g., Posey-Maddox, 2014), but the displacement of children who inhabited these neighborhoods prior to gentrification is critical (Lipman 2009). Gentrification, the process of neighborhood reinvestment, which attracts a different population from the one currently there, also affects children. One study from Austin, for example, highlights lamentations from residents that dogs are more populous that children in Austin’s gentrifying neighborhoods (Tang & Falola, 2018). Given the challenges in tracking children who move, measuring displacement is complex. However, administrative data indicate that most of the schools serving the Austin gentrifying tracts are under-enrolling, suggesting the displacement of children. These are the same schools slated for “modernization,” consolidation, and/or closure. Given that children are depopulating these gentrifying tracts, understanding the politics of childhood displacement is critical for the study of education policy. Yet, little is known about the experiences of those who are displaced.

In this study, I first situate the process of gentrification, displacement, and the fear of school closure in Austin. I then demonstrate the insights of a feminist geographic approach, being particularly attentive to emotional geographies of displacement. Specifically, I show how this framework disrupts the geographic notions of space and scale through urban intimacies (Datta, 2016) and how it emphasizes and legitimizes emotions (Pain & Staeheli, 2014). In these ways I argue that, as education researchers, it is useful to integrate feminist geographic approaches to more fully understand the nuanced meanings of displacement.

Datta (2016) explores the intimate violence that violates one’s right to the city. She argues that the state employs geopolitics, such as through public institutions, to ignore private matters to promote a public agenda perpetuating capitalist, racist, and patriarchal standpoints. As the longstanding residents sense that the school district is working to close their schools under the guise of modernization, it implies that a modern neighborhood does not include them. The discussion of modern schools without giving voice to the children who attend there is an urban intimacy of fear. The district’s modernization agenda violates the children’s right to the city schools, much like gentrification is a violation of the citizens’ right to the city.

In the context of gentrification and displacement of children, fear is an emotionally intimate experience perpetuated by a local government’s embrace of a globalized phenomenon. The child’s place attachment is not considered when discussing the closing of a school or the removal of a child from her neighborhood. Combatting the violent nature of the intimate-geopolitics is viewed as resistance, further complicating the violence (Faria, 2017). Acknowledging collective understandings is critical, but in acknowledging these understandings, we recognize that urban policies have intimate-global effects. The urban intimacies framework confirms these effects (Datta, 2016). Treating children’s experiences individually rather than collectively risks pathologizing and ignoring the power imbalances that function to provoke fear (Pain & Staeheli, 2014). Educational researchers working with children must be aware of the power imbalance imposed upon children, particularly upon children of color.

Author

• Michael R. Scott, The University of Texas at Austin