Emaciating Gramsci: Is Consent Still Needed in an Era of Disposable Communities?

• In Event: Education and the Racialization of Neoliberal Urban Governance: A Critical Geography Approach to Multiple Urban Contexts

Abstract

The next paper utilizes ethnographic research on race and education in Milwaukee and Detroit to highlight the ways in which neoliberal urbanism (Lipman 2004, 2011; Brenner & Theodore, 2002) is differentially racialized in two fairly similar postindustrial cities in the United States. Both cities have witnessed the introduction of educational market reform discourse as a driver for radically altering the form of educational provision in "failing" urban public schools. While both cities' school systems serve disproportionately African American and Latino low-income youth and their families, the author documents how the market-based educational reform agenda proceeded in the two cities from differing convergences of political actors and had as a primary demonstrative objective different neoliberal outcomes.

Drawing upon the fields of critical geography, political economy, urban sociology, and theories of the state and racial formation, the author contrasts a strategy of hegemonic inclusion of African American voucher-supporting communities in Milwaukee (Gramsci, 1971; Pedroni. 2007), with a much more hierarchically imposed educational reform model in Detroit (Pedroni, 2011). Not only were the strategies for advancing educational markets vastly different (hegemony versus coercion), but the primary goals of neoliberal experimenters also differed. While in Milwaukee neoliberals were primarily interested in utilizing African American disaffection from urban public schools to demonstrate the viability and palatability of diverting public educational funds to the private sector, in Detroit the primary objective of experimentally imposing market reforms mainly in the public educational sector appears to be the buttressing of the spatial reorganization of a shrinking city for the purpose of accumulation by dispossession, particularly via the real estate market.

The contrast between the two case studies also illustrates that hegemony is not the only or primary strategy through which capital restructures the social formation and educational sector according to its wants and needs. Rather, hegemony is deployed unevenly and opportunistically, according to its ability to produce the most optimal results. Elements of both hegemony and coercion are in fact differentially visible in both contexts, however at different points and for differing audiences. This contrast and variation traces back in part to regional particularities, including locally sedimented racial histories and invested meanings. Perhaps most starkly, the two case studies juxtapose the positioning of African American communities as politically astute and market savvy in the Milwaukee example, while incapable of self governance and disposable (Wilson, 2004) in Detroit.

The author concludes by arguing and agreeing (Brenner and Theodore, 2002) that neoliberal urbanism in education and beyond must be seen as a process and not as static and fixed. The forms, strategies and experimental goals of different neoliberal urbanizing projects can vary, underscoring the contingency and impermanence of actually existing neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). This last conclusion also reinforces that responses to neoliberalism in educational and other contexts by counterhegemonic forces, while accounting for broader and more generalizable trends in neoliberal urbanism, must also develop locally situated strategies and responses.

Author

• Thomas C. Pedroni, Wayne State University