Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education

by Ujju Aggarwal Narrated by Janina Edwards

Overview

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the "problem" of school choice actually not about better choices for all but about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.



Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007-2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private.



As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. This book tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for justice, and a public that remains to be won.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Brilliant in her artistry, Ujju Aggarwal carries us across narrative maps of an extraordinary set of relations. Her geographic analysis compels us into tense and complex terrains of partition and possibility: neighborhood, community, and school. Unsettling Choice exquisitely collides scale to consider vast histories and conditions of publics, choice, gentrification, abandonment, and more while simultaneously centering the profoundly intimate, local story of a group of women practicing radical care. Read this book, and be moved and transformed."—Sabina Vaught, coauthor of The School-Prison Trust

 

"Unsettling Choice combines ethnographic encounters with race theory emanating from Black studies and critical geography to present a nuanced understanding of how education and housing are structurally formed by race, class, and gender. Ujju Aggarwal's book is a must-read to understand the racialized violence inherent within one of the most fundamental aspects of education in the United States: the logic of choice."—Damien M. Sojoyner, author of First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles

 

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192342404
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/30/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged