Messy Assemblage: Collage-Making/Mapping Whiteness and Accumulation in Charter School Policy Networks

• In Event: 43.041 - Dis/Orientations: Mapping Whiteness in Educational Spaces

Abstract

This paper will explore the possibilities of mapping and collage-making for expanding educational research into the cultural political economy of urban education reform. In 2014, New York’s Governor Cuomo enacted legislation that mandated New York City provide new and expanding charter schools with rent-free space. If the city cannot house a charter in one of its own buildings, it must rent the school space from a private landlord. Such educational reform, animated by what George Lipsitz (2011) calls the white spatial imaginary, takes up school space in the discursive erasure of structural racism, while at the same time creating new channels for capital accumulation for a range of white-dominated private sector entities.

The author will use network analysis of the Success Academy charter corporation and its beneficiaries as a case that illustrates the embeddedness of co-location reform within the dynamics of “neoliberal racial capitalism” (Melamed, 2006). Collage-making will be used to map and analyze these networks as an “entanglement” (Fraser, 2016) through which whiteness joins with emerging strategies for capital circulation and accumulation. Mapping serves as a multi-scalar “cartographic narrative” (Velez & Solorzano, 2017) that links broader structures and discourses of neoliberal racial capitalism to their emergence locally within the socio-spatial relations of co-location reform. Collage-making, a means for “both inquiry and analysis, both curation and experimentation,” is a messy assemblage, much like the networks that advance white accumulation and racial interests (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2018). Furthermore, like collage, the networks and circuits that comprise co-location reform consist of “fragments and layers and pieces that come together” to make new knowledges and practices possible (ibid). Linking a granular level analysis of this “coming together” to a broader theorization of racial capitalism, the paper will conclude with some implications of collage-making for mapping the interimbrication of race and political economy in education reform.

Author

• Jeremy P Benson, Rhode Island College