Difference and recognition

This chapter examines the shooting deaths of several young Black men from 1988-2007 and how these deaths produced a spectrum of affects for those working to develop the school. This affective spectrum would coalesce with other feelings of empowerment and safety produced by the governing and patterned sequences of neoliberalism and biopolitics. The shootings accelerated the becoming of the school, and specifically, how the school settled into an established array of dispositifs concerned with recognition, difference, and safety. The chapter maps the policy landscape that used and perpetuated these specific dispositifs, largely products of anti-racist literatures. The second half of the chapter maps how Toronto District School Board Trustees used - and were used by - these dispositifs. The chapter concludes with showing how Trustees altered anti-racist dispositifs in favour of the ascendent logics of economic and educational choice. Trustees were simultaneously constituted by the ensemble of anti-racist dispositifs but in ways that accommodated and reinforced the policy mechanisms of educational choice and neoliberal ideas of freedom, understood as unfettered access to (quasi) educational markets.

Neoliberalism and the commodification of identity

*There is an extensive literature, over the course of 25 years, that identifies neoliberalism as a political-economic theory that utilises the efficiencies of market economics to develop and legitimate government priorities and practices. Neoliberalism also promotes forms of social organisation that emphasise individuals’ freedom of choice, and has emphasised ways to increase the educational choices of those who have been racialised as Black or African American. Neoliberalism calls for ‘freedom’, mostly understood in relation to the rights of the individual to market participation and of markets themselves to operate without interference from the state (...

Policy events

The first chapter introduces and discusses the theoretical choices of the book. The chapter introduces how education policy can be thought of in ways consistent with the philosophical and historical ideas of an event. Through the idea of an event, the chapter discusses the ideas of race and racism, recognition and representation, cities and neoliberalism, biopolitics, and eventalisation.

The impossibilities of representation

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Biopolitics and accounting for ourselves in numbers

*The debate about race-based statistics in Toronto constituted a politics of educational recognition via the imbrication of calculation with governance. There was an evident tension between the kinds of racism that were not ‘accounted’ for, and how raciologies were practised and perpetuated in education as part of anti-racist attempts....

Policy in/compossibles

*Why would we describe the becoming of the Afrocentric Alternative School as an event? What is an event? The preferred term of ‘case study’ would likely be more applicable qua educational research. We might drill further and describe our account as a particularistic case study, or as a ...

Policy events, race and the future of the city

The final chapter concludes the book by examining some of the effects of problematizing ideas of race, racism, equity and so forth, and explicitly takes on the challenges that emerge when education policy is constituted by contradiction, incompleteness, and indeterminacy. The chapter revisits the key concepts of the book (events, biopolitics, race, cities, neoliberalism, difference) and places them within variegated histories of inequality and what alternatives policy scholars might consider in relation to these histories, and potential futures.

Spatialising race within a moving city

*The ways that difference is produced and reconfigured through and due to race connects cities and education (Gulson, 2011; Lipman, 2011). Schools and policy are, furthermore, part of urban networks that ‘are complex: they interact and interfere with each other in ways which are not predictable and which produce ...

‘Up in the northwest corner of the city’: the city, race and locating the school

This chapter examines the event of finding a location for the school, and examine the connections between the ways in which the city was (and is) racialized and undergoing urban change around gentrification and the rebranding of neighbourhoods. The question about ‘where to put the Black school in the White city’ would produce strong feelings across Toronto given its long and troubled histories with placements of non-White populations (and in relation to each other). The argument within is based upon the idea that the question of location affected the entire process of the becoming of the school rather than just at the ‘end’ of a rational and sequential process. That is, the question ‘haunted’ Trustees and community members prior to any governance and policy-development activities designed to produce the school.

The (micro)politics of racial neoliberalism

This chapter maps the event of the alternative school policy of the Toronto School Board District understood as neoliberalism, and specifically racial neoliberalism. This analysis asserts how power and force operate within educational equity attempts and illustrates the necessary but insufficient attempts at educational equity that rely solely on moral and epistemological, including statistical, arguments. The chapter focuses on the material and ontological aspects of the policy environment affecting the event. The spatial and temporal analysis of this chapter underscores how objects and subjects easily interchange positions depending on the location of the analysis, including how (1) policy ‘activists’ simultaneously are policy ‘subjects’; (2) school mission statements are simultaneously efforts to develop a brand within quasi educational markets; (3) discourses of parental choice are conflated into contradictory discourses of educational entrepreneurialism and equity and, (4) moral statements against racism are erased through pressures to maintain the dominant policies and practices of colourblind (neoliberal) multiculturalism.