Catching the bus: A call for critical geographies of education

Abstract

AbstractInformed by recent struggles over schooling, this article proceeds from the premise that education is a deeply geographic and urgently political problem increasingly engaged by a wide range of scholars and activists. We argue that the current political moment demands increasing geographic attention to the confluence of social processes that shape schooling arrangements. We contend that this attention also must address how people involved in collective action understand and enact alternatives and how these mobilizations may articulate with other social movements. Although existing geographers of education have studied schooling in relation to other processes such as gentrification and citizenship, we argue that centering schooling as an object of study can enliven important disciplinary conversations. In light of these arguments, we call on geographers to advance geographic scholarship on education by creating a cohesive critical geographies of education subfield. Drawing from intensified interest in the geographies of education, this subfield can contribute to broader geographic debates by centering schooling in theory generation, rather than only studying education as a site of test cases for existing geographic theories. Given this call, this review highlights how the existing literature on schooling signals the potential of geographic work on education and marks considerations for the development of future research.