Education, Covid-19 and care : social inequality and social relations of value in the South Africa and the United States

Abstract

Abstract:Education has not been spared during the Covid-19 pandemic that has exposed deep inequalities across the world along lines of ‘race’, class, gender and geography, as well as the digital divide. However, many of the policy responses and solutions proffered to mitigate the crisis fail to address the generative structures that made public education institutions so vulnerable to shocks in the first place. Using the work of Nancy Fraser and Social Reproduction Theory (Bhattacharya, 2017), we argue that understanding the prevailing capitalist social institutional order, and the relations it generates between spheres of production and spheres of reproduction (including education), is fundamental to theories of change that not only respond to the Covid-19 moment justly, but also avoid reproducing and deepening the conditions that made Covid so cataclysmic to begin with. By analysing the conditions of public education across South Africa and the United States comparatively, a case is built for distinguishing between affirmative responses that leave inequitable structures intact and transformative responses that seek to address the root causes of injustice and violence amplified by the pandemic