Punishment as Pedagogy: An Exploration of the Disciplinary Alternative School

As school districts across the US attempt to reduce their reliance on exclusionary punishment—and declining suspension and expulsion rates are heralded as signs of success—understanding the complexities of education and carcerality remains an urgent matter. Through a critical content analysis of a number of sources, including existing historical and ethnographic research, code of conduct handbooks, school websites, news articles, and data reports, this dissertation foregrounds an institution that is framed as an “alternative” to exclusionary punishment, yet is motivated by the same carceral logics that have long-haunted the school’s practice of managing students. Chapter I introduces relevant literature on disciplinary alternative education, fleshes out major theoretical concepts, and locates the critique of the disciplinary alternative school within the broader projects of reform and carceral state expansion. Chapter II traces the history of the alternative school, situating it as a legacy of the state’s disparate treatment of “problematic” youth during the Progressive era of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. This chapter concludes that the alternative school has firm roots in the racialized notions of pathology and rehabilitation that motivated the child-saving and progressive alternative education movements. Chapter III demonstrates how the alternative school carries on the state’s tradition of pathologizing predominantly poor families of color but through distinctly neoliberal channels, as Progressive era assumptions take new forms under the influence of responsibilization and a “new paternalism.” Chapter IV undertakes a specific case study of Texas Disciplinary Alternative Education programs, illustrating how these schools prepare their students for futures of continued social and economic marginality within a neoliberal carceral state. Chapter V discusses how we can dismantle the carceral state and its adaptations, like the disciplinary alternative school, through the utopian imagination and abolition democracy. In its entirety, the dissertation uses the disciplinary alternative school as a heuristic model for recognizing and understanding the carceral state’s ability to evolve and thrive through progressive reform efforts. Foregrounding the experiences of exclusion, surveillance, and structural disadvantage that are often obscured by reformist language is necessary if we wish to raze a carceral state that continues to persist in important ways

Lost Ground: Neoliberalism, Charter Schools, and the End of Desegregation in St. Louis, Missouri

During the final decades of the twentieth century, U.S. urban education policy experienced a sea change in its orientation toward equity. Mid-century social liberalism and its programs for expanding access to public education resources through desegregation and more equitable funding gave way to neoliberal reforms focused on improving outcomes through deregulation, accountability regimes, and market discipline. Charter schools are the vanguard of neoliberal education reform. While much of the research on charters aims at either substantiating or critiquing their success claims relative to traditional public schools, in this dissertation, I examine the role of charter schools within the larger processes of urbanization. Specifically, I focus on St. Louis, Missouri, where, in 1998, a single piece of education reform legislation (Senate Bill 781) legalized charter schools and set an end for the largest and longest-running school desegregation program in U.S. history. Rather than legalize charters statewide, SB 781 restricted them to St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri’s only two metropolitan areas to have operated court-enforced desegregation programs. Combining critical policy analysis and economic geography, I link both desegregation and charter schools to urban neoliberalization, arguing that racialized processes of accumulation structured (and continue to structure) uneven development in such a way to make educational equity-based reforms necessary and their failures inevitable. Here too, St. Louis has an important story to tell. With deindustrialization and suburbanization resulting in a 63 percent decline in population in just over 60 years, St. Louis, like many other Rust Belt cities, has wholly embraced neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial ethos. Through public-private partnerships and a portfolio of tax incentives, St. Louis has sacrificed public education in its efforts to attract capital back to the city. Rather than mitigating these issues, the neoliberal restructuring of public education in St. Louis has embraced the same market logics that contributed to educational divestment and school segregation. I argue for a more expansive approach to critical policy analysis in education, one that addresses the limitations of reform within the existing political economy and relocates educational issues and their solutions within a larger struggle for racial and economic justice

Mobile Media: From Legato to Staccato, Isochronal Consumptionscapes

Mobile devices in the form of smartphones are transforming the temporality of consumption experiences, from languid and legato forms to isochronal and staccato forms. New communication technologies accelerate as well as alter mobile consumptionscapes. Rather than attempting to capture the elusive here-and-now essence of such fast-changing scenes, this essay invokes three historical episodes of technology and mobility – the transistor radio, the Walkman-style cassette device, and the MP3 player – to uncover the patterns that enhanced levels of mobility bring to the media consumption experience. In particular, by illuminating matters of time, some temporal framings are offered as correctives to spatially biased theories of mobile media. Drawing lessons from these historical episodes and blending in contemporary social theories about mobile technologies, we arrive at a temporally oriented view of the emergent consumptionscapes that can contribute to understanding the present era and the proximal future in terms of connecting both places and paces

Confucius, Yamaha, or Mozart? Cultural Capital and Upward Mobility Among Children of Chinese Immigrants

This study examines the determinants of upward mobility among children of Chinese immigrants. While most studies emphasize ethnic cultural capital as a primary determinant of Chinese upward mobility, this study proposes three new concepts to illuminate understudied processes promoting mobility. Specifically, this study argues that Chinese immigrants\u27 interactions with classical music schools in the Chinese community help generate globalized cultural capital (resources from immigrants\u27 participation in transnational networks), navigational capital (the ability to connect social networks together to facilitate community navigation through higher-status educational institutions) and aspirational capital (the ability of parents to acknowledge the barriers to upward mobility). These music schools offer parents highly valued Western cultural capital in the form of difficult-to-acquire competence in classical music, which parents are promised will help their children gain access to higher-status educational institutions. Parents internalize this valorizing of classical music and believe it will help their children. In addition, Western classical music as a component of Chinese American identity is also reconstructed and blurred through family cultural practice in the local context. Moreover, the competition to climb the educational ladder in the new land encourages Chinese immigrant families to create ethnic identities of hybrid cultural components. This more instrumental acquisition of highly valued cultural capital is a qualitatively different (though not incommensurate) explanation of Chinese upward mobility, which usually centers on Confucian values, retention of Chinese language, and obedience. This study seeks here not to attack the Chinese-values argument, but to argue that institutional factors outside the family are also crucial to understanding Chinese upward mobility

Service logic business model canvas

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to develop a service logic oriented framework for business model development. “Service logic” covers the basic principles of the three contemporary customer value focused business logics: service-dominant logic, service logic, and customer-dominant logic..

Race & Mobility in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Migration Control

Global movement and information technologies are changing practices of bordering, globally. Such matters are now also substantially urban. As cities of refuge rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they are also inviting the border closer to cities and migrant bodies. This marks a convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism. In New York City, infrastructural technologies such as sophisticated public Wi-Fi, smart ID cards, and digitalised city services, in an environment prone to deportation raids, has led to deep information “panics”. In Berlin, a combination of civil society and private sector technology initiatives have produced a deluge of largely unused or distrusted information services, job-matching, house-sharing, social credit, and identity management tools in the name of refugees. In lieu of mitigating conditions of displacement, these practices compound analogue borders by engaging in a practice of digitally fusing borders to racialised characteristics, resulting in symbolic, material, and epistemic forms of technological marginalization. Through following and documenting how migrant communities navigate and experience these digital urban interventions, and the logics of those who develop them, this dissertation 1) highlights how migrant bodies and urban spaces become contested spaces in the battle for racial capital – a frontier in which technology actors are chiefly concerned with reconstituting conceptions of race for power and profit, and; 2). unveils how digital urban infrastructures interact with subtle practices of racialised bordering. Drawing on an analytical lens rooted predominantly in the Black radical tradition, critical development and migration studies, and science and technology studies, it challenges the paradigms of techno-solutionism and techno-chauvinism, as well as critical digital studies that has tended to treat race and racialism as a symptom of, rather than as integral to, the technology industry. By extension, the field of migration has also tended to impart greater weight to the positive affordances of technology in contexts of displacement, in absence of the critical voice of would-be recipients and “users”. By attending to the frontiers of racial capitalism and increasing technology deployments, I advance the idea of the ‘digital periphery’ to make sense of how urban migrant environments and subjectivities are commodified and ‘datafied’. As a concept, the digital periphery allows for the rapid advance of technology upon displaced populations to be disaggregated. It reveals an inseparable and mutually constitutive entanglement of race, borders, and migration, advancing racial capitalism beyond its conventional physical and spatial limitations.This dissertation was completed with the financial support of the Jo Cox PhD Studentship at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and the Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust

“He was a true son of Lowell”: discourse on the opioid epidemic and mortality in a small city

This thesis explores the circulating discourse on opioid-related mortality in Lowell, a small, post-industrial city, through analysis of 173 articles from the Lowell Sun from 2007-2017. While opioid-related mortality has been on the rise nationally, the overdose epidemic is concentrated in particular areas, like the Middlesex Valley, a region in northeastern Massachusetts. Unlike the response to previous drug panics, the opioid epidemic has been constructed as a medical problem, that requires rehabilitative treatment rather than punitive intervention. Still, this “gentler” approach has been applied unevenly. This thesis has two main findings. First, the circulating discourse acknowledges the verified diversity of opioid users while simultaneously distancing white middle class men from the stigmatized legacy of the war on drugs in the inner city. This distance from the “urban problem” of drug addiction and possession is reinforced by narratives of the stable, nuclear family, loving mothers, and accidental experimentation with legally prescribed prescription pills. As social panics often mask other problems, in the city of Lowell, anxiety over the mass mortality exists alongside distress about the lack of opportunities for young people despite the city’s revitalization efforts. Second, I demonstrate the plethora of institutional resources available to assist young men struggling from opioid addiction despite the city’s economic problems. In lieu of resources from the state, the city’s residents and organizations adopt neoliberal self-help frames to protect their residents from addiction by providing prevention and treatment resources

Teaching for Transformation: Developing Agency and Solidarity Consciousness in a Critical-Transdisciplinary, Garden-Based Urban Environmental Studies Program

This dissertation focuses on “Community Roots,” an instantiation of urban, garden-based environmental education that employs a “critical-transdisciplinary” design framework and pedagogies. The “crit-trans” construct, articulated by the Urban Environmental Studies Research Coven (Strong et. al., 2016) is offered as both a generative approach to liberatory (environmental) pedagogies with applications across the curriculum and as a form of resistance to neoliberal logics shaping educational (and other) settings. After situating Community Roots in its socio-environmental, institutional, historical and theoretical contexts, a detailed description of the course’s instantiation of crit-trans pedagogy is offered. Additionally, reflections of 14 youth and adult participants are analyzed, using the constructs of affordances (Adams and Gupta, 2017) and Transformative Activist Stance, or TAS (Stetsenko, 2017) to inform a discussion of participants’ engagement with the program’s learning opportunities, based on their individual experiences and identities. From the perspectives of affordances and TAS, each of the participants demonstrated a unique enactment and development of personal agency, and in some cases expressed a sense of “solidarity consciousness,” a relational mindset elucidated in context. Both agency and solidarity consciousness are presented as dispositions that promote positive social engagement around complex environmental and related social-justice issues, with the intention of bringing about a more life-affirming and equitable futurity