Market Movements and the Dispossessed: Race,Identity, and Subaltern Agency among Black Women Voucher Advocates |
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| Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">Thomas C?PedroniEmail author |
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| Institution: | (1) Present address: Department of Secondary Education, Utah State University, 2815 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT 84322-2815, USA |
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| Abstract: | Critical educational researchers in the United States and elsewhere are missing something essential in their inattention to
considerable support among Black urban women for market-based educational reforms, including vouchers. While the educational
left has engaged in important empirical and theoretical work demonstrating the particularly negative impact of educational
marketization on the disenfranchised, not enough attention has been paid to the crucial role the educationally dispossessed
have actually played in building these otherwise conservative reforms. Engaging with Michael Apple’s arguments concerning
processes of identity formation within conservative movement-making, we can begin to conceptualize the importance of subaltern
groups in market-based educational reforms. Yet ethnographic work conducted with Black voucher mothers, school officials,
and community leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, shows that this subaltern process of conservative formation does not always
occur in the manner theorized by Apple and his colleague Anita Oliver, in which ideologically relatively unformed parents
and families are “pushed” to the Right by an intransigent state. Although the conceptual tools they provide are the foundation
of our ability to imagine a more compelling theorization of dynamics and social actors in Milwaukee, significant conceptual—not
to mention empirical—work remains to be done. In this essay I renovate Apple and Oliver’s arguments concerning conservative
modernization in order to make them more resonant with the processes of race, gender, subaltern identity formation and agency
evident in my ethnographic field research with low-income African-American women choosing vouchers for their families in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. Aided by critical, feminist, and post-structural theorists both within and outside educational disciplines I assess
the utility and limitations of Apple and Oliver’s framework in explaining the mobilization around ‘parental choice’ and vouchers
in Milwaukee. Based on my conceptual and empirical findings, I retheorize pro-voucher African-American politicians, community
leaders, and poor and working class women (and their families) as representative of a subaltern ‘third force’ in conservative
formation. Their tactical investments in fleeting conservative alliances and subject positions, I argue, are likely to play
an increasingly significant role in educational and social reform both in the United States and elsewhere.
Thomas C. Pedroni is an assistant professor of secondary social studies methods, educational foundations, curriculum theory,
and qualitative research methodology at Utah State University. His recent research has centered on issues of identity formation
and subaltern agency among urban low-income predominantly African-American and Latino parents within otherwise largely conservative
coalitions for publicly financed private school vouchers. His research interests also include the development of composite
critical and post-structural approaches in educational theory and research, the identification of persistent exclusionary
power/knowledge regimes in state-level educational reforms, and the analysis of the increasing colonization of the global
educational sphere by neo-liberal and managerial forms. |
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| Keywords: | : race gender vouchers identity |
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