Development Abandoned: Corporate State Education, the Geographies of Racial Capitalism, and Working Class Organizing

• In Event: Contested Reforms: Fighting for an Education for the Public Good

Abstract

This paper engages the concept of organized abandonment to examine how corporate education reform spatializes the education of working-class communities of color. Drawing on (auto)ethnographic and archival research in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, I explore how school consolidation, closure, and co-location function as anti-relational technologies that produce uneven racialized and class-based geographies of learning, life, and labor. Anchored in the geographic experience of urban and rural communities, I highlight how state and corporate disinvestment in education has been challenged by Black working-class organizers. An analysis of their efforts offers scholars of educational studies a spatial approach for understanding how corporate school reform has constructed schools in the image of the neoliberal state. Thus, I argue for a critical spatial praxis that foregrounds social, historical, and spatial dimensions of education. This framework is rooted in humanization rather than dispossession, enabling communities to resist abandonment and reconstruct educational futures.

Author

• EZEKIEL JOUBERT, California State University- Los Angeles