The Matter of “Culture” During the War on Poverty: Historicizing the Culture-Economic-Security Nexus in U.S. Education Reform

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Utterances and Mo(ve)ments of Remedy Across Curricular Contexts (Table 11)

Abstract

The US education reform today treats the “culturally diverse students” as the most vulnerable part of the educational pipeline required for economic development and social security. This article historicizes this culture-economic-security nexus by tracing how the "culture of poverty," which holds culture accountable for poverty, was invented by the mid-twentieth century American social scientific research, taken up by the US federal government to initiate the War on Poverty targeting at dropouts as a “national emergency,” and then translated by education researchers and administrators into the discussions of the "culturally deprived children” and intervention programs in the 1960s. The paper argues that the discursive practices of the culture-economic-security nexus made the poor feel more deprived instead of empowering them.

Author

• Lei Zheng, Peking University