Dr Christopher Lizotte

I lay out a case for recognizing “vulgar territory,” a fusing of superficial categories of spatial sovereignty with identarian rhetorics of belonging. I argue that vulgar territory is composed of two primary elements: first, a simplistic conception of sovereignty as being entirely contiguous with state borders. Second, affective elements of spatial belonging, particularly hope and fear. These two basic elements combine in various ways depending on the particular meanings, images, and emotions that are assembled in particular geohistorical contexts. I show this with a rough typology of “vulgates” of hyper-bordered and feminized territory by examining recent examples from around the world.

In this paper, we make a case for situating the school as a geopolitical site. The geopolitical functions of schools and schooling have long been investigated by geographers: forming national citizens, promoting geostrategic discourses, and disciplining populations, to name a few. However, we advocate an approach that is “outward looking,” examining the school not just as a space where these functions are carried out by the state, but as a site where institutional structure, educators, and students exercise agency in complicating the actual implementation of state geopolitical aims. We do this by examining two cases where public schooling has been leveraged by Western states in the service of the post-9/11 securitization of Muslim students in the United Kingdom and France. We argue that these two cases illustrate that schools can be examined not just as containers for state policy, but as explanatory moments in their own right in understanding state geopolitical strategy.

Laïcité, France's idiosyncratic form of secularism, is a complex concept that is dense with historical genealogy, practical contradictions and – crucially – political geographies. In particular, contemporary laïcité is characterized by a state-sponsored model of universal citizenship that regards French Muslims' identity claims with mistrust. This tension, always latent, was brought to the fore by a series of attacks perpetrated self-styled jihadists in January 2015, centered on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo notorious for its provocations against Islam. The attacks and their aftermath also highlighted a key space where conflicts over laïcité often play out: the French public school, the école républicaine. This institution was conceived in its modern form as a mechanism to assimilate through laïque pedagogy. Today it is a highly visible space where the optics of race and gender contribute to a narrative of Muslim communautarisme, a willful and defiant communalism that rejects the republican community of citizens.

Following a handful of incidents in which students refused to participate in a moment of silence for the victims of the January 2015 attacks, the Ministry of Education undertook an initiative involving disciplinary and pedagogical supports for laïcité in the schools, called the Great Mobilisation for the Republic's Values. Like other past interventions in this area, it operationalizes an assimilating vision of laïcité to bring recalcitrant peripheries into compliance with republican norms. At the same time, though, it reveals the agency of the peripheries to negotiate the terms of laïcité according to local knowledge and needs. On the basis of interviews with educators serving in schools where elements of the Grand Mobilisation were carried out, I show how they push back against the overarching narratives that characterize the initiative and in so doing construct localized and nuanced understandings of the laïque social pact.

Marked-based reforms in education have garnered the support of politicians, philanthropists, and academics, reworking the nature of public education in the United States. In this paper we explore the methods used to produce consent for market-based reforms of primary and secondary (K-12) schooling in the United States, focusing on two case studies to interrogate how this consent is generated as well as how these reforms are resisted in place. In doing so we illustrate how market-making in public services is a contested terrain and the importance of understanding the nature of their roll-out at the local level.

Parental activism in education reform, while often portrayed as an exemplary manifestation of participatory democracy and grassroots action in response to entrenched corporate and bureaucratic interests, is in fact carefully cultivated and channeled through strategic networks of philanthropic funding and knowledge.  This paper argues that these networks are characteristic of a contemporary form of neoliberal governance in which the philanthropic “gift” both obligates its recipients to participate in the ideological projects of the givers and obscures the incursion of market principles into education behind a veneer of progressive activism.  Drawing on archival research as well as personal interviews with Seattle-based reform advocates, representatives of philanthropic organizations, and school administrators, the paper points to the need to critically evaluate the “roots” in grassroots movements and trace their connections to larger institutions and agendas.

School reform efforts in the United States often declare the entire institution irreparably unresponsive to student needs and in need of a fundamental overhaul. Consequently, coalitions that incorporate business and philanthropic actors have advocated strongly for the introduction of market logics into the public system. I argue that these movements are facilitated by creating a sense of obligation that is mapped onto the space of the urban or metropolitan area. I draw on archival research and open-ended interviews to demonstrate the degree to which this moral obligation dominates reform efforts in the Seattle area through two coalitions: the first, made up of local business, philanthropic, and citizen groups that advocate for introducing market logics of choice and accountability, and the second, made up of parents who advocate for a network of alternative schools that meet the needs of students not served by the public system. Based on these differences, I argue that the former coalition's greater influence is in part due to its ability to mobilize an image of urgency around school reform that is geographically specific even as it glosses over differences in the spaces of education quality within the larger Seattle area.