Localising and historicising privatization: Understanding education privatization's links to enclosure, othering and urban spaces

• In Event: Making visible the unseen: Interrogating Education in Latin America through Feminist and Intersectional Lenses

Proposal

Privatization in and of education has been studied mostly in relation to its links with the global neoliberal turn at the end of the last century. Following feminist, decolonial and racial capitalism approaches, I argue that the legacies of coloniality, racism, patriarchy and sexism are at the basis of a privatized educational system in Peru that reinforces enclosure and exclusion. These lenses can allow us to historicize and locate different theoretical underpinnings for the study of contemporary privatization and commercialisation of education. First, unpack the concept of privatization beyond economical capital, and include its links to political, social and cultural forms of capital (Fraser 2020). In that line, I understand privatization of education as a form of enclosure of social relations, and of social reproduction (Federici, 2004; Fraser, 2022; Bourdieu 1979). Second, these approaches allow us to unsettle the notion of the ‘public’ or the ‘common’. Literature on privatization of education in the Global North tends to pose this phenomena in relation to a Western Keynesian welfare state that secured education as a public good. However, in Latin America, the state and public spheres have historically excluded an important part of the population based on class, race, ethnicity and gender (Quijano 2000, Rivera Cusicanqui 2010) and, in that sense, have had a privatized nature since its inception (Cotler 2005). The paper dialogues with debates on the porousness between and within the categories of ‘public’ and the ‘private’ in education (Mockler et al, 2020; Gorur & Arnold, 2020), locating it in a postcolonial context, and questioning who has been included and excluded from and within them through history and localities. This nuanced understanding of the ‘public’ in Latin America could be useful not only to make visible the contradictions the state and public spheres pose in these contexts, but to envision the future for authentic spaces of encounter.

This presentation draws on an archival analysis on policy and historical documents so as to trace a genealogy of the notions of public and private education in the last century in Peru, and trace its present configuration to its spatial configurations and settlements, and to its past co-formations of exclusion (Bacchetta 2007). In doing so, it uncovers the different ways in which these were understood, used and enacted in earlier and contemporary times. While the research is still ongoing, I suggest that while critical scholars have cautioned about the blurring lines between both spheres during neoliberalism, these blurring lines have been a constitutional part of the public and private since its inception in postcolonial contexts. Moreover, that the understandings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in education and its blurring boundaries transform through conjunctural moments, and that processes of enclosure and privatization are exacerbated through the possibility of encountering the ‘Other’ (Cesaire, 1950; Spivak, 1985; Hall, 1997). Overall, I propose that we must historicize and localize the research on privatization in and of education, trace its spatial configurations and settlements, and its past co-formations of exclusion (Bacchetta 2007) in order to understand its current manifestations.

Author

• María Fernanda Rodríguez, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge