Ship in the Storm or Ship as the Storm? An Ethnography of Racial Stratification at a "Social Justice" School (Poster 38)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Scholars have long sought to examine the ways in which urban schools serve as sites of social reproduction and thus, contribute to racial and other social inequalities in the society writ large. To date, research has emphasized the deleterious effects of harmful pedagogies, unrepresentative curricula, unequal access to family resources, problematic sorting practices and school segregation. This large and influential body of scholarship has yielded many important insights about educational problems, but has often framed studies of inequality as being between Whites and people of color. The result of this dominant framing is that we understand less about the machinations of racial inequality between different groups of color in urban schools that do not serve White students. My study addresses the need for research on school-based racial stratification between groups of color by studying one school site over four consecutive school years. To examine the puzzle of persistent racial inequality between Black and Latinx students at a self-described social justice school, I utilized observations, in-depth interviews(n=93), document analysis, and novel qualitative spatial methods. My study finds that social justice schools can be, as Christina Sharpe has noted, both a ship in the storm and ship as the storm. That is to say, social justice schools can provide spaces of healing and transformative resistance while also excusing and extending mechanisms of racial stratification. This poster presentation will focus on the tensions that manifested between the school’s antiracist stance and its failure to address antiBlackness in the wake of George Floyd.

Author

• Julio Ángel Alicea, Rutgers University - Camden
  Presenting Author