Holding Contradictory Pieces of Themselves: White Parents Organizing for School Desegregation (Poster 45)

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

Abstract

This study examines the motivations of white and/or privileged parents organizing for school desegregation and how they wrestle with the contradictory pieces of themselves, individually and collectively, in their efforts for a more just education system. Ultimately, this is a study that builds from established understandings of  how white and/or privileged parents (re)produce harm and inequality even when they have the best of intentions and to reveal specific tensions, constraints, and paradoxes they navigate in their organizing for school desegregation. The goal of this study is not to ignore the harm and reification of racism and inequality white and/or privileged parents construct, but rather to interrogate how they grapple with the contradictions and tensions of their organizing. I do so through a four-year qualitative case study using critical ethnographic methods, examining Parents for Equity (PFE), a group of white and/or privileged parents organically organizing for school desegregation in Oakland, California. I incorporate an interdisciplinary conceptual framework with attention to the local political economy and analytical tools from the learning sciences and social psychology to capture the contradictions, tensions, and organic nature of the participants’ school equity organizing across the individual, interactional, organizational, and structural levels. 

Author

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author