Abstract
Abstract Alongside a crisis of public health, COVID-19 has also engendered a crisis of social reproduction in the domain of public education. Drawing on conversations and collaborations with K-12 education advocates in the Phoenix metropolitan area, this essay deploys an activist methodology to identify political struggles and turn the ethnographic lens onto the publics and political economies that shape them. After situating contemporary Phoenix schooling in the regional history of the southwest-turned-sunbelt, I examine emerging features of pandemic education in 2020: managed dissensus, caretaking achievement, and education technology enclosures. I retool the concept of “managed dissensus” to argue that, in polarizing debates about the pandemic, conservative politics shifted from consent to coercion in order to maintain priorities of privatizing education and “reopening” the economy. Further, as districts pursued virtual schooling, I show how an institutional project of caretaking achievement produced new patterns of alienation, disengagement, and punishment among teachers and students. Third, I consider how technology created unequal enclosures of parents and students in new gendered, racialized, and ableist regimes of education. As the pandemic continues into 2021, anthropologists should continue to examine public education and social reproduction as sites where state power, racism, and colonialism are expressed and transformed.
Highlights
Sunbelt SchoolingContemporary struggles over education in Phoenix emerged from a regional history of racial and settler colonial state formation
Alongside a crisis of public health, COVID-19 has engendered a crisis of social reproduction in the domain of public education
As COVID-19 cases grew in Arizona, I began hearing from parents, students, and teachers I had come to know over the last two years of research with progressive education advocates in suburban and urban school districts across the Phoenix valley
Summary
Contemporary struggles over education in Phoenix emerged from a regional history of racial and settler colonial state formation. Alongside the militarization of the southern border, the state banned a Mexican American Studies program for promoting “unamerican” views, despite its success with increasing student achievement.4 The outcome of this history is a sedimented regime of sunbelt schooling that coproduces the region’s political economy, within which activists and advocates continue to struggle over relations of social reproduction. Schools are defined by racial and colonial logics whereby certain students are cared for and cultivated and others are punished and pushed out They are sites of struggle for state support, Chicano culture and language, Black liberation, and Indigenous sovereignty
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