Conjunctural Analysis From the Margins: Studying Counterhegemonic Visions of Education Through Chicago's Early Alternative Schools

• In Event: "When a Conjuncture Unrolls, There Is No Going Back": Education and Social Crisis in Chicago

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Conjunctural analysis requires not just analyzing the crises of the hegemonic order, but also studying potentially counterhegemonic projects (Camp, 2016) and their alternative visions for the world we want to build (Davis, 2020). This paper asks: What visions of liberation were imagined and enacted in previous conjunctural crises? To explore this question, the paper traces a group of Chicago’s alternative schools back to their formation in the late 1960s, during the last major conjunctural crisis. It remembers and uplifts the histories of communities who struggled against the racialized criminalization and containment of youth while also building a multiracial coalition that envisioned and practiced liberatory education.

The paper uses fighting and building as its theoretical framework, inspired by how educators in Chicago’s early alternative schools approached their own work and by calls for dual strategies in abolitionist movements today. Adapted for this project, the framework brings together lenses of critique (or “fighting”), including neoliberal education policy (Lipman, 2011, 2013, 2017) and the school-prison nexus (Stovall, 2018), with lenses of possibility (or “building”), including freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002) in praxis (Freire, 2000).

Methods
The broader project grounding this paper created and engaged a hybrid methodology called conjunctural analysis from the margins that: 1) surfaces visionary projects and the emergent ideologies of liberation in the margins that began to take shape during a previous conjunctural crisis; 2) studies the contradictions and social forces through which they emerged; 3) traces what happened as they encountered competing and shifting ideologies, conditions, and strategies of racial capitalism; and 4) reflects on how the lessons we learn from them can inform strategies of liberation under our current conjunctural crisis. This methodology combines tools of conjunctural analysis--ideological analysis, researching conjuncturally, and working collaboratively (Clarke, 2010; Hall et al., 1978; Hall & Massey, 2010)--with strategies from the margins, which included shifting the epistemological center to potentially counterhegemonic ideologies, centering the sources of data in marginalized people and their emergent ideologies of liberation, situating the unit of analysis in coalitions, and engaging an ethic of refusal (Anzaldúa, 1987; Cohen, 1997; Collins, 1990/2002; hooks, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981/2015; Sandoval, 1991; Tuck & Yang, 2014).

Data
The primary data sets used for this paper were 271 alternative schools archival documents from 1969 to 2010, and 21 oral histories the author conducted with founders and long-time educators at Chicago alternative schools.

Conclusion and Significance
The study found that a coalition of the alternative schools grounded their visions and emergent practices in self-determination, self-governance, creative production, and critical pedagogy—together constituting liberatory education. As an educator who taught later in that coalition, I offer reflections on what we can learn by studying past visions of liberatory education, including how to imagine beyond the racial capitalist state, how to pay attention to residual fragments of liberatory education today, and how “fighting and building” has resonance with the political organizing of social movements today, as it continues to inform new forms of political work, of praxis, and of participation in those movements.

Author

• Stacey Krueger
  Presenting Author