Research frameworks: historical representations and formations of race and class meet neoliberal governance

Abstract

Dreamfields describes how its disciplinarian structures liberate and transform its cohort of ‘urban children’. These children are assumed to come from unstructured, unhappy homes, where working class parenting, not ethnicity, is described as the problem. However this ‘urban child’ is inherently racialised due to the majority of students coming from ethnic minority backgrounds. The chapter shows how race and class were mutually created through historical representations rooted in the development of industrial capitalism, classificatory mechanisms and empire before showing how these historical trajectories are evident within Dreamfields’ current approach. Theoretically, the chapter discusses how processes of subjectification work to cultivate docile bodies so that ‘appropriate’ capitals can be grafted on.