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Educational Ethnography and
the Politics of Globalization, War, and Resistance By Pauline Lipman
On July 16, Mayor Daley presided over the opening of Millennium Park, a
new 24.5-acre, $1 billion “world class” park, sculpture garden, and
performance space on Chicago’s refurbished lakeshore. Millennium Park
is the latest jewel in a new downtown lakeshore landscape of parks,
museums, tourist attractions, upscale shops, and cultural venues.
The initial target of Renaissance 2010 was the Bronzeville area on the South Side, historic center of Black cultural and intellectual life. Over the past 30 years, Bronzeville has been devastated by deindustrialization and public disinvestment. The massive high rise public housing complexes that lined the expressway at the edge of Bronzeville had one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the U.S. All that is history. Under the guise of creating mixed income communities, 19,000 units of public housing in Chicago are being demolished. Most of it is completed. According to a report by Suhir Venkatesh, most of the displaced African American residents have been dispersed to other extremely low-income, racially isolated urban and suburban areas, and few have been relocated in new mixed income housing. With the landscape scrubbed clean of the buildings and the people who lived there, new luxury housing complexes are rising up in their place. Bronzeville is one of the hottest gentrifying areas in the city as reflected in two indicators: rate of increase in housing prices and rate of house sales. Bronzeville also had the highest concentration of proposed school closings under Ren 2010 until CPS withdrew its proposal under community pressure. At the many community meetings, rallies, public hearings, and picket lines I participated in, parents, community members, teachers and students denounced CPS for closing their schools and gentrifying their community. Many of them contended that the accountability system set them up to be closed down. Parents described a revolving door of programs, principals, probation partners, and central office interventions. As one LSC leader said, “You can’t separate the failure in these schools from what’s been done to them by CPS.” A parent asked the school board, “How do you expect us to trust you after what you’ve done to our children?” A pervasive theme is that the city is using the school closings to drive out low-income African Americans and support gentrification by opening new schools of choice to attract middle class residents. Bronzeville protesters picketing outside the Board of Education chanted, “We’re not blind. Just follow the dollar sign.” About a week ago, I was at a meeting in a church in Englewood, another South side African American neighborhood where schools are being closed. Every speaker who confronted the CPS official sent out to respond to the community was crystal clear about the history of disinvestment in their schools and community and the gentrification and removal of low-income African Americans that is driving Renaissance 2010. To quote a community member, “We’re being pushed out of the city under the guise of school reform.” The closing of schools is both concretely, and symbolically, linked to the destruction of these communities. Englewood High School is the signature school in the community. The community meeting was filled with its former students. One of them said, “When you destroy a community’s school, you destroy a community.” This refrain has been repeated around the city. On the West Side, a resident of North Lawndale, called Ren 2010 “an act of war on the community.” The significance of this community analysis is illuminated by looking at global economic and political forces shaping the city. Gentrification as Global Urban StrategyIn an environment of global capital mobility, cities engage in what David Harvey (2001) calls aggressive “space marketing” (see also Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Chicago’s ubiquitous new boulevards and wrought iron fences, its massive lakeshore remake, and now Millennium Park exemplify this strategy. Gentrification is a crucial aspect of marketing the city, and Neil Smith argues that it has become a central motive force of global urban economic development, “a pivotal sector in the new urban economies” (Smith, 2002, p.447 ). Unlike housing-centered gentrification of the past, the new wave of gentrification transforms whole landscapes. It includes gentrification “complexes” of consumption, recreation, culture, and public space as well as housing. Smith argues that “[G]entrification as urban strategy weaves global financial markets together with large- and medium-sized real-estate developers, local merchants, and property agents with brand- name retailers, all lubricated by city and local governments….” (Smith, p.443). Nothing could more clearly describe what is happening in Chicago. The key producers/investors in gentrification are consortia of global financial capital. But the consumers are the middle and upper-middle classes. In this sense, new gentrification complexes represent the middle class colonization of the city, and quality schools are a key part of “space marketing” specific neighborhoods to the middle class. The class nature of this process is, as Smith points out, hidden in the language of regeneration and revitalization — or in Chicago’s case “renaissance.” Gentrification is cast as a positive strategy for urban decay and the achievement of social stability through mixed income communities with mixed income schools. The implication is that there cannot be good working class schools and communities. Where mixed income housing has been built, on the site of the former Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, former project residents are few in number, carefully selected, and subject to a separate set of behavior rules. Race is obviously central here. And in the post-civil rights era it is conflated with class. A CPS press release announced that schools to be closed (all in low-income Black communities) exhibited a “culture of failure.” The discourse of failure and “cleaning out” and “rebuilding” is rooted in the demonization of those to be displaced. This is the significance of closing schools and reopening them with new names and new identities. Bronzeville is a valuable piece of land, but its development is impeded by its construction in the white cultural imagination as a space of danger and lawlessness. A population that has become expendable in the restructured labor force (“unskilled” and “unmanageable”) and “dangerous” in the city’s global city image of middle class culture, sophistication, and stability, must be removed and/or contained and regulated. The dispersal/ removal of low-income African Americans is facilitated by closing the schools and forcing children to transfer to schools in other neighborhoods, some across gang lines. At the same time, the regulation of students of color is accomplished through militarized neighborhood high schools and public military schools. These schools help establish a new “truth” — if schooling is going to work for urban youth of color, it will need to be highly regimented. Providing discipline for Senn High School students is part of the discourse of local business owners and developers who support the Naval Academy. In short, Renaissance 2010 exemplifies how education policy can serve the agenda of financial capital and the city’s political leadership by responding to and promoting gentrification, undermining unions, weakening democratic community participation, and expelling and regulating people of color. Resistance
However, Renaissance 2010 it also exemplifies a global dialectic playing out on the local level. As school policies are implicated in a larger neoliberal agenda of financial speculation, privatization, union busting, gentrification, and racial regulation it draws together social sectors and communities that have not been working together. Ren 2010 is a work in progress with CPS constantly shifting targets in response to community pressure. It promises to be a long, complicated struggle with no certain outcome. But there are the beginnings of a nascent alliance of African American and Latino communities on the West and South sides, parents, LSCs and LSC Federations, teachers and other school employee unions, students, progressive teacher organizations, and school reform groups. Hundreds of teachers, students, and community residents showed up to challenge CPS leaders and naval recruiters at Senn. When naval representatives tried to show a recruiting video, many turned their backs. Despite community hearings, rallies, and demonstrations, CPS approved it. Blatant disregard for community voice and the transparent link to gentrification and removal of people of color has galvanized opposition in multiple communities. An Englewood High School student told a CPS official: “Your whole plan is to push us out to those beat up suburbs. We’re going to stay in this city. We’re not moving.” We are presented with both danger and opportunity. The stakes are high. At the Englewood church meeting last week, the reverend closed his prayer/ manifesto with these words to the CPS representative: “We’re not going to allow disrespect without consequences. In god’s name.” Ren 2010 is a bold plan to redesign schools to redesign the city. It emanates from the pinnacles of financial and political power. It is not only about schools but also about who will live in the city, who will have a voice, what kind of city it will be, and who will have what kinds of jobs. This is an example of what some have termed “glocalization” — the dialectics of the global situation unfold in local contexts. Without exaggerating what is happening in Chicago, I want to suggest that Ren 2010 demonstrates that education issues, in the present situation, have the potential to be a lightening rod for opposition to neoliberal agendas. People make the links because the issues are linked.
Opportunities for activist researchFinally, I want to talk briefly about opportunities for Activist Research My study of Renaissance 2010 is a product of a hybrid methodology: one part critical policy analysis, one part qualitative research, and one part activism. It is grounded in past qualitative work and analysis and informed by my participation in numerous school board meetings, public hearings, community and school meetings, rallies, press conferences, picket lines, planning sessions, coalition meetings, and forums over the past six months. During this time I have had on-going conversations and working relationships with parents, students, teachers, school administrators, community organization leaders and members, members and heads of local school councils, the director and staff of a city-wide parent organization, congressional staff, representatives of teachers and school employee unions, school reform organizations, and community research groups. I have not only observed but also strategized, testified, and organized. In this work I am looking for ways to engage in activist-oriented research in concert with community organizations. A graduate student and I collaborated with geographers at the University of Illinois - Chicago to produce maps that depict the intersection of gentrification patterns and Renaissance 2010 school closings. Community organizations took these maps and the policy briefs we wrote door to door in the community. Our next step is to collaborate on vignettes in which students, teachers, and families speak about the effects of CPS policies on their schools. Our research blurs borders between activism and ethnography. It is both partisan and methodologically rigorous, committed to accuracy and complexity and to social justice. The people affected by these policies know what is happening in their schools and communities. They have an historical perspective grounded in lived experience and developed analyses of the race and class forces at work. They have data, multifaceted strategies, articulate spokespeople, and political will. They also have the input of lawyers, school reform organizations, and community research groups with well-researched information. There is much to learn from them. I have been speaking with them at community hearings and forums. What my research can add is a political economic analysis and engagement with a global perspective. I think it’s important, but it’s just one piece. I understand that activist research means collaboration under the direction of the communities affected, and that what we know is just one piece. Beyond critique, the power of the World Social Forum is that it beginning to demonstrate concrete alternatives to the neoliberal discourse of inevitability that claims there is no alternative to capitalism and the market. Community leaders against Ren 2010 are beginning to say the key thing we need is an alternative. The oppressiveness of high stakes testing, racism, and militarized public schools have given rise to social justice education projects around the country. We need to study, theorize, and document them. There are powerful examples at this conference. I will list three more. First, in Chicago, there is a new social justice high school born out of a hunger strike by Mexican mothers and grandmothers. Researchers and community people are documenting its development. Second, the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA) sponsors a powerful summer seminar for high school youth of color to learn to do critical social research. Ernest Morrell is both co-director and ethnographer of that project. His documentation and analysis provide theoretical and practical direction for similar projects. Third, I am working with graduate students and teachers to study, theorize about, and develop a small social justice academy in a Chicago public high school. Tomorrow, they will be discussing their research and practice. These projects illustrate the role of activist-oriented research in the development of a new education agenda. Hope Grounded in the Dialectics of the Present SituationI want to end by returning to the dialectic that I began with. We are in a dangerous period. The forces that dominate the world: politically, economically, culturally, and militarily are enormous. Hope would be idealistic if it were not grounded in this social dialectic. Stephen Gill argues that the diverse social movements that have developed in response to global neoliberalism are beginning to form what Gramsci called “an organism, a complex element of society” that is beginning to point towards the realization of a “collective will.” It’s a global political movement with no center or clear leadership structure. It cannot be easily decapitated. It seeks to combine diversity with new forms of collective identity and solidarity in and across civil societies. (Gill calls this movement “the post-modern prince,” building on Gramsci, who, in his prison writings, referred to the working class movement as the “Prince.”) Although the many movements are local in nature there is a broad recognition that local problems may require global solutions. Gill concludes: “So whilst one can be pessimistic about globalization in its current form [and I would add about U.S drive for empire) this is perhaps where some of the optimism for the future may lie: a new set of democratic identities that are global, but based on diversity and rooted in local conditions, problems and opportunities.” Resistance to militarization of schools, oppressive testing and accountability regimes, school closings for gentrification, and privatization of public education are part of this. As are the nascent social justice schools, projects in which youth do critical social research in their communities, the teachers helping students learn to read and write the world with mathematics, and so on. These projects create new educational discourses. Our work does not stand outside this dialectic. I’m proposing that we think more about how we can engage it. I am also supporting activist research that challenges — together with students, teachers, and communities — ways in which schooling is being used to further a dangerous agenda of political coercion, economic and social inequality, racial exclusion, war, and the commodification of social life and research that examines in complex, nuanced ways the possibilities of projects that bear the seeds of an alternative future. I’m going to finish by talking about a movie. I just saw the film “The Take” about a movement of factory workers in Argentina who are taking over and running factories that were closed down by their owners in the crash of the Argentine economy, when the neoliberal dream turned to nightmare. The film examines the web of neoliberal economic and social relations that gave rise to unemployment and impoverishment. Argentina had the largest middle class in Latin America; now 50 percent live below the poverty line, and whole families in tattered designer clothes pick through the garbage. The film focuses on the movement of factory occupations. Workers occupy the factories, get them running again, and operate them collectively with no bosses. The slogan of this movement is “Resist. Occupy. Produce.” This is not an ideological movement. These are the factories where the workers worked until they were closed, left idle, and in some cases the machines sold as the economy crashed and transnational investors pulled out their capital. With no jobs, the workers have really no other choice. Under worker management and control, they are proving to be more efficient, to run more smoothly, to charge less for their products, and of course to be more equitable. The film follows the workers through this process. It examines what the factory means to them, what work means in their lives, how the occupations have united the community, and how they have changed how the workers see themselves. All good ethnographic questions. It also explores the enormous difficulties and uncertain future of this movement. The film is a nuanced analysis of global and national social forces, the constraints of the present world order and the possibilities. One garment worker said at the end of the film that their movement showed that another world really is possible and she asked, if we can run the factories this way, why can’t we run the society like this. This experience is the basis for a new set of social relations and a new discourse of agency and social justice. I thought it was a very good ethnography.
References.A.T. Kearney (2004, October 7). A team of knowledgeable people who produce extraordinary results. A. T. Kearney website home page. On-line. Available: http://www.atkearney.com/main.taf?p=1 (Retrieved October 7, 2004. ) A.T. Kearney (2004, May 6). Chicago Public Schools Mid-south CommunityPlanning Process, Planning Meeting #4. Unpublished document. Available from paper authors upon request. Bello, W. (2003, July 5). Crisis of the globalist project and the new economics of George Bush. Paper presented at the McPlante Conference, Berlin, June 27, 2002. Available: http://www. zmag.org/content/print_article. cfm?itemID+3920§... Bourdieu. P. (1998). Acts of resistance. New York: The New Press. Brown, E. (2003). Freedom for some, discipline for “others.” In K. L. Saltman & D. Gabbard (Eds.). Education as Enforcement (pp.127-151). New York: Routledge. Castells, M. (1989). The informational city. London: Blackwell. Chomsky, N. (2003). Confronting the empire. On-line. Available: http:/www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2938§ionID=40 Cox, R. W. (2004). Beyond empire and terror: Critical reflections on the political economy of the world order. New Political Economy, 9 (3), pp. 308-323. Gill, S. (2003). Power and resistance in the new world order. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, D. (2004). The new imperialism. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2001). Spaces of capital: Towards a critical geography. London: Routledge. Lipman, P. (2004b). High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. New York: Routledge. Lipman, P. (2002). Making the global city, making inequality. Political economy and cultural politics of Chicago school policy. American Educational Research Journal, 39 (2), 379-419. Author. (In press). Lipman, P. & Gutstein, E. (2004). The policies and politics of cultural assimilation. In P. Lipman, High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform, pp. 105-167. New York: Routledge. Parenti, C. (1999). Lockdown America: Police and prisons in the age of crisis. London: Verso. Popen, S. (2002). Democratic pedagogy and the discourse of containment. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 33 (3), pp. 283-294. Porto Alegre II: Call of the social movements. Resistance to neoliberalism, war and militarism: for peace and social justice. (2003). World Social Forum. Retrieved, August 8, 2003, from http:// members,xoom. virgilio.it/ infoceontro/ SocFor2003/ ESFgb001.htm Ranny, D. (2004). Global decisions, local collisions: Urban life in the New World Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Roy, A. (2003). Instant-mix imperial democracy: Buy one, get one free. A lecture sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights. Retrieved August 8, 2003, from http://zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=3637§... Sassen, S. (1994). Cities in a world economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Sassen, S. (1998). Globalization and its discontents. New York: The New Press. Smith, N. (2002). New globalism, new urbanism: Gentrification as global urban strategy. Antipode, 34 (3), pp. 427-450. Tabb, W. K. (2003). The two wings of the eagle. Monthly Review, 55 (3), pp. 76-82. Wacquant, L. (2001). The penalization of poverty and the rise of neo-liberalism. European Journal of Criminal Policy and Research., 9 (4), pp. 401-412. |
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[The following was the Keynote address presented at the 26th Annual
Ethnography in Education Research Forum Center for Urban Ethnography,
Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania February 25,
2005. It is published here with the permission of Dr. Lipman]
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