Place Fracture: How People Experience, Understand, and Respond to the Loss of Community at School

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 2:30 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Fracturing and Transforming Race and Place (Table 19)

Abstract

What happens when a community loses a school, when it is disrupted by closure, re-structuring, or re-population? What is the collective response when a school is forever changed? This paper will outline a nuanced conceptual framework of what we call place fracture, the myriad experiences of people when school-as-place changes, and placemaking as a community response when fracture occurs. We ask questions like why, how, and for whom does school become a life-affirming place? When a place like school fractures, who picks up the pieces to build and imagine again? How are such places remembered/re-membered? We discuss exemplary cases from relevant literature, and conclude by highlighting the significance and future directions of this framework in education research, practice, and action.

Authors

• Megan McCormick, Vanderbilt University

• Julio Ángel Alicea, Rutgers University - Camden