Theorizing F*ckery: Insights From a Critical PAR Approach to School Rezoning in a Segregated District

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Into the Fray: Critical Participatory Action Research Approaches for Impacting Policy and Building Community Power (Table 39)

Abstract

Despite being widely condemned, segregated schooling is (still) ubiquitous. In a society where education is highly valued and framed as key to increasing socio-economic status, the normalized context of racially segregated schools and the inequities in education that correlate are one of the ways we can clearly see the structurally racist architecture of our society.

Take New York City. New York City continues to produce the most segregated school system in the country (Cohen, 2021). This reality is widely acknowledged, yet despite years of attention and policy intervention, segregated schools remain entrenched.

In this paper, our team of community and academic researchers share the process and findings of a project in which we used Critical Participatory Action Research to design and decide a school rezoning in a segregated corner of New York City. This project had an explicit commitment to ensuring that communities historically left out of educational decision-making i.e., Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color and public housing residents, were centered and led this process. We are a group of mothers and grandmothers whose young children were in the schools impacted by a rezoning. One of the research team members/authors consistently pointed out the “fuckery and audacity” of the systems and structures with which we contended. We theorize the concept of fuckery as deeply held knowledge about how systems and structures are operating as they were designed to, in other words, to hoard power for those already in power. Fuckery is how systems of white supremacy are operationalized, Critical Race Theory provides a frame through which to understand this. We understand fuckery as a given (see Bell, 1992 on the permanence of racism), and we use that lens as revelatory (Kelley, 2014) to help us see clearly what is so that we can dream wildly, lovingly - and effectively - about what could be.

In this presentation, we outline the development of a participatory action research approach to district planning done in collaboration with the Department of Education. We share findings that emerged via critical participatory knowledge production and detail key insights and critical commitments gleaned through the process. Using data from a critical participatory action ethnographic study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, that included 75 in-depth interviews and a survey (N=805) from directly impacted community members, we share key findings that shaped a community-powered, community-accountable vision for equitable schooling in our area. Drawing on this data, we propose that in order to effectively tackle issues of structural racism in education, of which school segregation is a symptom, it is worth focusing on and fostering critical participatory approaches to educational decision-making and governance. We put forward that prioritizing critically participatory processes is one way to effectively work toward undoing inequitable schooling.

Authors

• Maddy Fox, Brooklyn College - CUNY

• Nancy Randall, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Vanessa McKnight

• Crystal Vega

• Esther Fesale

• Natasha Rossi