Challenging the Crisis: Female Teachers, Capitalism, and Nationhood in Croatia's Minoritized Education Amidst COVID-19

• In Event: Navigating challenges in education: exploring technology, activism and suppression in diverse contexts

Proposal

This paper focuses on the experiences of female teachers as essential workers involved in educating ethnic minority, refugee, and migrant children during the COVID-19 pandemic in both rural and urban areas of Croatia. Our research addresses the complexities of gendered and racialized labor in the context of the pandemic, examining how teaching and domestic responsibilities are transformed during crises. It also explores what these transformations reveal about neoliberal pressures, as well as the resilience and resistance of teachers, forming a basis for envisioning communities of care.
We investigated the experiences of female teachers amid ongoing societal, economic, and health crises by employing critical feminist ethnographic methods, specifically drawing on biographical narratives. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of female teaching labor and the shifting nature of care work within neoliberal capitalism. We theorize our findings using frameworks from social reproduction theory, feminist critiques of precarity, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the concepts of vulnerability, resilience, and resistance.

The role of education in the construction and maintenance of the nation states, their borders, and the capitalist production relations has gained renewed interest, as Grek and Landri (2021) argue, examining the social inequalities exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Relatedly, the authors of this chapter explore the multifaceted ways in which the intertwined pandemics, both COVID-19 and societal pandemics (ITSRC, 2020; Bužinkić, 2023; Kalio, Mitchel et al., 2020), reinforce social order in which gendered and racialized teaching labor can ensure the reproduction and sustenance of the economic interests of the state. Moreover, we interrogate how COVID-19 governance enabled the intensification and adjustment of the capitalist regimes of oppression to ensure the socialization and discipline of the workforce, future and current. The educational processes continued to serve the profit accumulation, and reestablished the ethnicized and racialized hierarchies of workers amid the ongoing neoliberalization of education (Althusser, 2014; Apple, 2013). In this article we look at the ways the politics, methodologies, and affects enacted by COVID-19 education governance have impacted the labor of teaching itself, as well as teachers' well-being, and their capacity for self and community care. Furthermore, we examine how the recent health pandemic has inscribed new meanings of precarity for female teachers and what this reveals about their role in reproduction of nationhood, capitalism and biopolitics, as well as their embodied struggles and resilience. Here we portray and theorize teachers' experiences during lockdowns and less stringent periods, both in online and in-person settings, analyzing the complexities of formal and invisible labor, and organization of their everyday life amidst the pressure to contain the virus spread among students, parents, teachers, and school administrators.

In doing so, we engage both with and against the narrative of crises (Psycher et al., 2023). We examine the malleable notion of teaching during crises, which simultaneously required teachers to adopt new methods of teaching and learning in making sure their communities survived in the economically and socially challenging conditions, while also visibilized how essential educational work is in the reproduction of the global and state-led biopolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic (Grek & Landri, 2021). This pandemic governance measures also reinforced the patriarchal roles (Maskalan & Gvozdanović 2023), racial and ethno-nationalist order (Bužinkić & Šelo Šabić, 2024), and capitalist modes of functioning (Mezzadri, 2022). In other words, the COVID-19 crisis served as an opportunity to reinforce dominant systems of power through the management of the teachers´labor and access to collective resources (Bhattacharya, 2017; Kalio, Mitchell et al., 2020), as our previous research (Bužinkić, 2023; Bužinkić & Šelo Šabić, 2024; Čolović & Petričušić, 2023)and this one demonstrate. At the same time, the teachers resisted the expected and prescribed conditions of their work, supporting the students and communities, deprived from socio-economic safety and cultural inclusion, as they came from the racialized, gendered and otherwise deprived realities themselves.

We contend that the crisis is not an exceptional occurrence, disrupting an otherwise organized and supportive environment for children and teachers, but the consistent and deliberate condition that students and teachers in minoritized education are pressured to continuously navigate. Since capitalism penetrates every part of the social fabric, the economic value ascribed to certain types of work is translated into the value afforded to the lives and bodies of those who are performing or expected to perform them, transgressing the workplace into the classroom, housing and even such constructs as a ´free time´. The racialized and ethnicized communities, as the supply of the surplus labor, during COVID-19 have been treated as disposable and replaceable, as those whose lives are not “essential enough” to be supported in this accentuated isolation and scarcity.

Despite that, the collective memories and experiences of continued crises across global and local geographies—such as wars, natural disasters, health pandemics, and humanitarian catastrophes—demonstrate the richness and profoundness of resistance in building coping strategies, care practices, and individual and community resilience. We argue that these practices, developed in problem-solving specific situations, can connote the broader political potential for a more comprehensive and systematic societal change. Exploring the ways in which the marginalized communities managed to subsist, we immerse our research optics in the possibilities of shifts in the current political, economic, cultural, and environmental ambiance. We write against the crisis-engendered “panicked narrative” that centers on fear, abnormality, isolation, control, and knowledge loss (Psycher et al., 2023). Instead, we emphasize the importance of capacity-building, knowledge, resilience, community care, and solidarity.

Author

• Emina Buzinkic, Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO)