Mark Stern

“We Can’t Build Our Dreams On Suspicious Minds” Neoliberalism, Education Policy, and the Feelings Left Over

Last fall, the author took his Politics and Education class to see Waiting For “Superman.” This was a movie we had been preparing to see all semester. The class focused on reading contemporary educational policy as a symptom of neoliberal economic and political ideology. We went into the movie knowing what we were going to see and how to critique it. But a funny thing happened on our way out of the theater—many of us were crying. Despite all our strong and tough ideological critiques, we were glassy-eyed and barely even able to remember who deregulation was and what Milton Friedman had to do with anything. After a semester of thinking with our heads, we were standing there feeling with our hearts. In this paper, the author reflects on these experiences by paying attention to his own pedagogy and how the critique of neoliberalism functions to both preclude and produce certain types of affects.

On the charter question: black Marxism and black nationalism

This article brings two black intellectual traditions to bear on the question of charter schools: black Marxism and black nationalism. The authors examine the theoretical and rhetorical devices used to talk about charters schools by focusing on how notions of ‘black liberation’ are deployed by the charter movement, and to what end. The authors first use a black Marxism lens to illustrate the character of the racial and economic relationships facilitated by charter schools. Next, the authors use historical methods to contextualize the liberation discourse of school choice proponents within a black nationalist history of school reform. The authors conclude that ‘choice’ rhetoric makes claim to the black freedom struggle without addressing its most enduring commitments to social justice and self-determination, ultimately perpetuating dependency by oppressed people upon their oppressors. The study identifies the limitations of contemporary critical theory to excavate several dimensions of racism in educational policy and highlight the need for scholars to draw on black intellectual traditions to evaluate the theoretical and historical significance of contemporary educational reform.

The Normative Limits of Choice: Charter Schools, Disability Studies, and Questions of Inclusion.

As charter schools continue to attract lots of political and policy attention, research has emerged suggesting that these schools enroll fewer students with disabilities than public schools. Given that the success of the movement is based on charters being more effective than public schools as determined by test scores, it is not entirely surprising that we see exclusionary practices taking place. Responding to this issue, many states have increased oversight to ensure inclusion and equity. At the same time, other charters have opened specifically for students with special needs. Using a disability studies lens, this article asks questions of the charter movement and the policy responses by problematizing the perpetuation of both normative school practices and constructions of ability.

Presence, Absence, and the Presently-Absent: Ethics and the Pedagogical Possibilities of Photographs.

One of the fundamental pedagogical questions in teaching about human rights, war, and global citizenship is how to educate students to care about strangers whom they may never know and whom they may assume they have nothing in common with. At its core, this is an ethical question that highlights a problem in articulating relations between self and other. This article proposes a type of deconstructive literacy that uses photographs depicting suffering to address how viewers can consider their responsibilities to other people in a world marked by violence. Critiquing normative pedagogical methods that use the visual power of photographs to impose ethics upon viewers, I outline how what I term a hauntagogical approach provides an opportunity for an emergent ethical relation between a viewer and the viewed. Suggestions for foundations approaches to pedagogy are considered.

Do “Undocumented Aliens” Dream of Neoliberal Sheep?: Conditional DREAMing and Decolonial Imaginaries

ABSTRACT Dreams have long been thought to be a space of fantasy and utopic hope. From Paulo Freire to Gloria Anzaldúa to Robin Kelley, many scholars have related the ability to dream with the ability to act collectively, to self-actualize, and to call into being worlds yet to be realized—dreaming as a radical political act. What happens, then, when dreams lose their ability to sense outside of the existing order? What happens when dreams become a mere recapitulation of that which already is? What happens when dreams become legislated and coerced? In conversation with contemporary literature on biopower and psychopower, this article acts as a dream interpretation of the DREAM Act (dreampower), analyzing how the assemblages of immigration, citizenship, and power come together by and through new technologies of governance. Focusing on the role dreams play in the political transformation of “undocumented aliens” into more terrestrial/palatable beings, we examine the ways material and symbolic forms of neoliberal life have been operationalized to patrol and condition what constitutes acceptable dreams and, therefore, who can be a DREAMer. We conclude with a call for a decolonial politics of ensueños: a call for a sleeping and a dreaming of alterity where we wake up in order to dream, and dream in order to wake up.

Big Talk in the Little City: Grassroots Resistance by and for the Common/s

This chapter sets out to do two things. First and foremost, the authors tell the story of a grassroots reimagining of urban development and community as a site of radical democratic action in Geneva, NY, wherein a broad-based interracial coalition of progressive, left, Black nationalist, and civil rights activists mobilized to redress a neoliberal land-use initiative that aimed to legitimize the privatization of public spaces. Second, and intertwined, we situate this story in the contemporary literature on neoliberal urban development and how current protests and rebellions are offering new ways of thinking the relationship between public space, democratic ideals, and the educative potentiality of a renewed commons.