Politics of Redaction: Boundary Work Among Digital Technology Youth and Community-Based Organizers

• In Event: 66.064 - Youth and Community Voice? Perspectives on Challenging a Racial Politics of Inclusion

Abstract

Collectively held ideas about digital technologies as a way to personalize learning and prepare youth for future global workforce needs coordinate vast educational policy resources (Burch and Good, 2014; Spring, 2012). Yet, these taken-for-granted approaches to digital education reform tend to elide attention to structural inequities within and beyond schooling (Anyon, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 2006). This comparative ethnographic case study examines how actors at two youth and community-based organizations in California mobilize digital tools amid mainstream digital technology discourses and increasingly inequitable socio-political contexts.
Drawing on new institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Scott, 2003) and sociological studies of boundary work (Lamont and Molnár, 2002, Purser, 2009), I examine how technology-based, education reform organizations draw boundaries to define themselves, and also investigate legitimating resources and barriers that each organization recruits in relation to these boundaries. Data includes eleven months of participant-observation at a Silicon Valley nonprofit organization (“Accelerate-Edu”), twelve months of participant observation at an Oakland nonprofit organization (“InnovateEquity”), and twenty-five interviews with organizers across both cases. I analyzed qualitative data using a “two-level” coding scheme (Miles and Huberman, 1994) and developed emic codes emergent in the data (e.g., “scale,” “rubber stamp”) and etic codes drawn from new institutionalism (e.g., “legitimacy,” and “survival”) and boundary work (e.g., symbolic distinctions, such as “race,” “community,” and “place”).
I argue that Accelerate-Edu drew boundaries that intimated their relations with powerful state and corporate actors. In addition, Accelerate-Edu extended mainstream policy approaches to more personalized digital learning and sought to integrate youth into existing structures of economic opportunity. By contrast, I found that InnovateEquity drew affinities to “everyday people” from communities of color and approached digital technologies as a way to build local power for equitable school-community change. Moreover, InnovateEquity mobilized digital asset-mapping technologies that challenged taken-for-granted policy assumptions about future workforce needs, and instead, mobilized asset-based approaches to neighborhood organizing.
Contrasting forms of boundary work mapped onto competing social and material relations within the Bay Area digital technology organizational field. Whereas Accelerate-Edu recruited overlapping economic investments and political legitimacy that “snowballed” across districts, InnovateEquity encountered fierce resistance to their everyday work,  including micro political efforts to redact the language they used to engage community members. Based on these contrasting findings, I develop the concept of a “politics of redaction”: patterns of action and interaction in the organizational field that tend to delegitimize, but do not determine, organizations that contest prevailing education reform institutions and challenge structural inequities.
By combining new institutionalism and boundary work, this study empirically illustrates a link between macro political-economic inequities, meso inter-organizational concepts of legitimacy, and the everyday labor of engaging youth and community in neighborhood organizing efforts. Additionally, this paper offers implications for justice organizers and identifies strategies of power that subversive organizers might utilize to advance counter-movements for educational justice. Aligning with this year’s annual theme, this paper offers theoretical and pragmatic tools for scholars interested in making research matter to historically disinvested communities and building toward a populist movement for educational justice.

Author

• Ethan Chang, University of California - Santa Cruz