Fighting on the frontlines: Intersectional organizing in educators' social justice unions during COVID‐19

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores a growing trend in the politics of education: the intersectional frontline organizing work of educators' social justice unions on behalf of a woman‐dominated workforce and local students, families, and communities, many of whom experience racial and economic disparity. I show that educators' social justice unions have tended to coherently employ intersectional language to articulate student, family, and community need along racial and class lines during the COVID‐19 crisis, but have struggled to explicitly tie a gendered analysis of educators' working conditions to the raced and classed public school experiences of the populations they serve. In the spirit of supporting the growth of educators' social justice unions in the educational justice movement, I bring together the theoretical work of Angela Davis, David McNally and Nancy Fraser to argue that long‐term movement growth requires enhanced intentionality in naming systemic identity‐based linkages across worker and student experiences of public schooling while highlighting how “advanced neoliberalism” co‐opts identity‐based rhetoric to maximize capitalist accumulation for the few while limiting educational equity for the many. In other words, I assert that movement growth requires intentional articulation of the systemic identity‐based relations linking working with learning conditions in late‐stage capitalism.