Reclaiming and Remaking Racialized School Spaces: Illuminating Agency Through Expanding Understandings of Space

• In Event: Resisting Policies of Displacement and Dispossession in Educational Spaces

Abstract

School as an institution is a constraining space (Goffman, 1959). For historically marginalized groups school has been used as a tool of control and deculturalization (Castagno et al., 2016; Spring, 2010). This paper explores relationships among power, race, space, constraint, and agency in education contexts. More specifically, we employ the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to understand power and the ways it constructs subjugates and constrains in the “racialized spaces” in and around schools (Blaisdell, 2016). Specifically, we examine the construct of space, and physical and figurative space(s) in two contexts and demonstrate the ways that expanding understandings of space and the agency practiced within spaces will make strides toward “Cultivating Equitable Education Systems for the 21st Century.”

Authors

• Aprille J Phillips, University of Nebraska - Kearney

• Tricia Gray, University of Nebraska - Lincoln