The Visibility and Invisibility of State Governance: A Critical Analysis of Educational Policy and Development Educational Initiatives (Panel 1 of 2)

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Many policymakers view state-led and market-driven development as capable of coexisting in a mutually beneficial way (Baum et al., 2014). Proponents of this perspective envision a "win-win" scenario where businesses, philanthropic organizations, and the state collaborate to achieve shared objectives (see Moeller, 2018; Giridharadas, 2019). The state's primary role in this framework is facilitating successful public-private partnerships. The underlying assumption is that businesses drive innovation through their products and services while the state implements these solutions effectively. Within this neoliberal approach to development, the state's visibility becomes a contentious issue. On the one hand, the state becomes highly visible when celebrating new agreements and policies that expand the role of the private sector into traditionally public areas, including schools and universities. However, it is less apparent when making the daily workings of state action transparent to the naked eye. When the state's presence is hyper-visible, it may face calls to dismantle its role through pejorative caricaturization of the deep state. Conversely, when the state’s presence is rendered invisible, calls for greater state presence tend to increase. Here, we frame the state's appearance in people's lives as the subject of our presentations.

In the two panels we propose, we argue that these calls for more or less state presence overlook the tangible ways in which people experience the effects of state action in education. Furthermore, these approaches may lead us to believe that the issue at hand is the state's relative presence or absence, when in fact it may be more productive to consider the state’s shifting configuration, boundaries, and purposes across time and space (Sharma and Gupta 2006). Scholars such as Robertson et al. (2014) urge us to consider how hybrid modes of governance, including public-private partnerships, operate at different scales and reveal interdependencies that are not anticipated by the state and other actors. Here we propose a two-part series of panels that look more deeply and ethnographically at state governance as a process (see Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly 2015). In doing so, we consider more humanizing and radical ideas about the state and its current and potential role across global contexts in an era of big data and connectivity technologies.

Our panels bring together six papers focused on the relationship between the state and other actors in Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Morocco, and South Africa. In the first panel, the first paper uses an ethnographic account of a 2013 teachers’ strike in Rio de Janeiro to demonstrate how, when necessary, states can use hypervisible violence to enforce market-friendly neoliberal policies that lack popular support. The second paper employs document review and interviews to develop a decolonial feminist critique of how families in Colombia navigated both the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressures that emerged as the country became a member-state of the Organization for Economic Development. The author describes how families used situated knowledge, collaboration, and reflection towards mind freedom as they navigated intersecting educational and social demands. The third paper analyzes policy documents, news sources, and social media alongside ethnographic and participatory action research with youth in the Dominican Republic to reveal how the public and private sector engage in the twin efforts of developing ocean economies–namely sustainable tourism–and youth as human capital through “blue skills” workforce development initiatives. The author argues that as education becomes depoliticized, youth are encouraged to “knowledge, appreciation, and respect” for natural resources to the extent that they are understood as local resources for tourism. For the second panel, the first paper draws on long-term ethnographic research in Morocco to examine the tensions between the Ministry of Education’s efforts to produce shareable images of functional schooling and how teachers—as state agents, employees, and members of their local community—are called upon to assist with the production of such images. The author reveals how teachers prepare for state visits to their school by drawing on a broad linguistic repertoire that not only evinces expertise in state protocol, but also the ability to be playful, relatable, and comforting for children in a context of stress and pressure. The second paper uses archival research, participant observation, and interviews to interrogate commonplace understandings of state absence in guerrilla-controlled areas of Colombia. The author illustrates how the state modes of extraction, subtraction, and immobilization shed light on relationships between the larger educational sector, the focal school site, and the ways that students and teachers interact. The third and final paper. The third paper maps out the contours of the unfolding socio-edu-care systems in South Africa, focusing on a case study that addresses the needs of vulnerable youth in prison-like settings with different virtues of education and care. The paper analyses the implications of these shifts for the everyday experiences of marginalized youth desperate for public provision, services, and visibility and how the state has allowed the private sector to intervene, reshape, and reconfigure its public mandate in the 2020s.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Chair

• Diana Rodríguez-Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Performing pluralism: Language policy and mediatized state hypervisibility in Morocco - Gareth C Smail, College of Charleston

• Extraction, Immobilization and Substraction: Invisible Forms of State Presence in an Armed Conflict Setting - Diana Rodríguez-Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Safety in the arms of Violence: Education in the age of digitisation and private incursion in public provision South Africa - Azeem Badroodien, University of Cape Town

Discussant

• Claudia Milena Diaz-Rios, OISE University of Toronto