Economizing Life Through Educational Reforms: The Reconfiguration of Racialized Hierarchies and Differential Human Worth

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Educational reform discourses herald their newness through claims of technological innovation (e.g., real-time data) and progressive orientation (e.g., cultural/gender sensitivity). This premise obscures a longer history of educational interventions in (post)colonial settings. This symposium pushes beyond discussions of neoliberalism as a singular phenomenon to examine heterogeneous techniques that tether current concepts of equity, diversity, and empowerment to epistemic infrastructures that assign differential life worth and authorize intervention. Drawing on Murphy’s (2017) economization of life, the papers explore how educational reforms inscribe and calculate the prospective value of individuals and populations to the national economy, and how those calculative practices reconfigure racialized hierarchies, constitute uneven affective atmospheres, and permit new forms of preemptive governance.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 3: Methodologies, Cosmologies, and Philosophies (The Shaping of Curriculum)

Chair

• Radhika Gorur, Deakin University

Papers

• Anticipating Secure Futures: The Promises of Moral Girlhoods and Quantified Data - Karishma Desai, Rutgers University

• Domestic Products: Historicizing the Desire for the Educated Girl - Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Paper Trails: Extraordinary Proof, Academic Evidence, and American Exceptionalism in African Immigration - Brenda N. Sanya, Colgate University

• From Unhygienic Bodies to Health Care Burdens: Shifts in the Racialization of U.S. Science Education Reforms - Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Culturalizing Economy and Security: The Historical Co-Construction of Educational Pipelines and At-Risk Bodies in the United States - Lei Zheng, Peking University

Discussant

• Anthony L. Brown, University of Texas at Austin