Theorizing From the Intersections: Understanding Education Policies and Practices Through Critical Feminist Theories

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium presents a series of papers that approach the study of educational policies and practices through the lens of intersectionality. Over the past three decades, critical feminist analytics emerging from Black, U.S. Third World, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and decolonial feminisms have interrogated how difference functions within universalized subject categories, such as “woman” or “Black.” They have sought to understand the ways in which categories work together to generate multiple exclusions. Drawing on these theories, the papers consider how race, gender, sexuality, nation, etc. function as multidimensional co-formations. They illuminate how these powers are not arbitrary epiphenomenon, but rather are constitutive of educational policies and practices, albeit in varying and contingent ways under different historical and geographic conditions.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 2: Differences and Intersectionalities

Chairs

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

• Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University

Papers

• "We Were Never Allowed to Be Children": Understanding Black Girlhood in Predominately White Schools - Ashley L Smith-Purviance, The Ohio State University

• Not All Mothers Are White: Expectations of Motherhood and Parental Involvement in Schooling - Sam Prough, University of Delaware

• Chuj Youth and Educator's Intersectional Decolonial Resistance - Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University

• Who Profits From EdTech? An Intersectional Feminist Analysis of Venture Capital Investment in Education - Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge; Klint Kanopka, Stanford University

• Black Mothers' School Selection Decision-Making Processes: Making Educational Decisions to Protect and Prepare - Tarsha I. Herelle, Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Erika C. Bullock, University of Wisconsin - Madison