Suchergebnisse

Rezoning public school attendance boundaries offers important possibilities for promoting school integration; however, it tends to generate contentious debates, often with white, middle-class parents furiously opposing school reassignments. In this paper, we ask: what logics and discourses do race and class-privileged parents draw on to justify educational inequities, and how are such discourses employed? To explore these questions we analyze a high school rezoning controversy in the Williamsburg-James City County School Division in Eastern Virginia. We conducted a content analysis of public commentary collected from school board meetings, two district-administered surveys, and social media and local news outlets. We bring together Critical Race and Settler Colonial theoretical perspectives to argue that white, middle-class parents and residents mobilized the intertwined logics of private property and whiteness to claim entitlement to the highly ranked Jamestown High School. They did so by combining well-worn colorblind, deficiency frameworks with argumentative logics that leveraged their position as property owners in affluent neighborhoods. First, they linked home ownership in expensive, residential subdivisions to "responsible parenting," "freedom," and "choice." Second, they constructed the social bonds and "community" forged in overwhelmingly white, high-cost, residential sub-divisions as valuable to schools, making residents deserving of assignment to "the best school." This analysis sheds crucial light on the discursive linkages between color-blind racism and white private property and how white, class-privileged parents mobilize these deeply intertwined logics to defend entitlement to educational resources.

In the current historical moment borders have taken on heightened material and symbolic significance, shaping identities and the social and political landscape. "Borders"—defined broadly to include territorial dividing lines as well as sociocultural boundaries—have become increasingly salient sites of struggle over social belonging and cultural and material resources. How do contemporary activists navigate and challenge these borders? What meanings do they ascribe to different social, cultural and political boundaries, and how do these meanings shape the strategies in which they engage? Moreover, how do these social movements confront internal borders based on the differences that emerge within social change initiatives?Border Politics, edited by Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, explores these important questions through eleven carefully selected case studies situated in geographic contexts around the globe. By conceptualizing struggles over identity, social belonging and exclusion as extensions of border politics, the authors capture the complex ways in which geographic, cultural, and symbolic dividing lines are blurred and transcended, but also fortified and redrawn. This volume notably places right-wing and social justice initiatives in the same analytical frame to identify patterns that span the political spectrum. Border Politics offers a lens through which to understand borders as sites of diverse struggles, as well as the strategies and practices used by diverse social movements in today's globally interconnected world. Contributors: Phillip Ayoub, Renata Blumberg, Yvonne Braun, Moon Charania, Michael Dreiling, Jennifer Johnson, Jesse Klein, Andrej Kurnik, Sarah Maddison, Duncan McDuie-Ra, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Nancy A. Naples, David Paternotte, Maple Razsa, Raphi Rechitsky, Kyle Rogers, Deana Rohlinger, Cristina Sanidad, Meera Sehgal, Tara Stamm, Michelle Téllez

Most non-Central Americans think of the narrow neck between Mexico and Colombia in terms of dramatic past revolutions and lauded peace agreements, or sensational problems of gang violence and natural disasters. In this volume, the contributors examine regional circumstances within frames of democratization and neoliberalism, as they shape lived experiences of transition. The authors—anthropologists and social scientists from the United States, Europe, and Central America—argue that the process of regions and nations "disappearing" (being erased from geopolitical notice) is integral to upholding a new, post-Cold War world order—and that a new framework for examining political processes must be accessible, socially collaborative, and in dialogue with the lived processes of suffering and struggle engaged by people in Central America and the world in the name of democracy