Embodying Borders: Teachers’ Spatializations of Race and Power

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Examining decolonization, spatialities of race, and safe space

Proposal

Overview
Borders are ways in which individuals both construct and understand the world (Nayak, 2011). As an ordering mechanism, they determine the extent to which one is ‘in’ or ‘out.’ As human-beings, we are situated within multiple borders, having to navigate political and cultural spaces and geographies of “memberships and representations; of constituencies and locations (or sites) of power; of unified and isolated territories” (Balibar, 2009, p. 191). Borders and bordering are both real and imagined. Imagined borders – the ways borders are embodied or imagined by individuals or groups – mediate one’s own way of seeing how place and space function

This paper explores the critical events and historical narratives of segregation, which shape teachers’ understandings of how race and class serve as borders that restrict access to educational opportunity. It does so by assessing: the ways in which historical political conflicts between the US and other ‘superpowers’ (rise of choice, competition, free market schooling) have led to a re-alignment of race and class relations inside US schools; the relationship between rising austerity and xenophobia in US schools; and novel forms of racial segregation’s re-inscription of historical colonial and eugenic legacies linking race, class, and ability. As such, this paper argues that borders, whether geographies of race or of privilege, construct biopolitical spaces within educational sites. Drawing on focus group discussions with K-8 American educators in the Chicago metropolitan area, this paper provides evidence of how understandings of race and capital were spatially applied by teachers. Participants located and conflated individuals, social classes, and racial groups with place. In doing so, they demonstrate how spatial borders and the practice of bordering continue to function as a segregationist way to understand race and power in schools and society. With regards to education, this differential investment results in inequitable educational opportunity that falls along race and class lines. In such a context, equitable education is unsustainable as the racialization of place and spatialization of privilege result in borders of ‘durable marginality’ that deny voice to marginalized students and their families.


Theoretical Framework
Through a critical examination of the ‘temporal arc’ (Riceour, 1981) of segregationist policy and the school choice movement, this paper argues that teachers’ spatializations of race and power are built into the language of 'discriminate biopower' (Fullwiley, 2004)–a mode of regulating the politics of race, class, equity, and education. Inequitable access to quality education in the United States through racial and socioeconomic borders has become a convincing means through which to perpetuate the normalization of conceptions of race and class in schools and society which intrinsically value particular bodies at the expense of others.


Data Sources and Scholarly Significance
This paper uses qualitative focus groups with teachers to examine the language of discriminate biopower in educator views on the factors that promote or inhibit student success. This paper highlights how historical segregationist policies and current school choice policies have resulted in both tacit and overt forms of racialization that inform widening social divisions in schools and growing global educational inequalities.

Author

• Daphne Martschenko, University of Cambridge