Statemaking Through Distant Presence in the Urban Periphery. An exploration of Scaled Education Actors Negotiating Possible Futures in a Changing Sociopolitical Landscape in Chile.
The education system in Chile has been a paradigmatic case of implementing privatisation policies in schooling to the detriment of public education. Nevertheless, during the last decade, following a series of high-school student protests, the country has been slowly implementing remedial policies to address class segregation, exclusion, and quality issues in schools that have arisen as a consequence of privatisation and market-driven policies. At the same time, socio-political changes around the world ―primarily the constellation of forces such as the heightened privatisation of states and cities alongside rising populism and recent substantive social unrest in the Latin American region, including Chile― suggest that this narrative of apparent inclusion falls short in addressing the challenges posed by these crises. The changing nature of highly spatialised politics means that the implementation of the inclusion policy reform will take place in a landscape framed by new social configurations. In these new configurations, the previous categories of inclusion/exclusion will no longer be enough to understand advanced marginalisation, social demands, and reconfiguration of imagined futures that have occurred not only in Chile but worldwide in the last years. Therefore, it becomes imperative to address this new socio-political landscape in both education and the changing nature of Chile, including the political pressures that drive them. Using a sociological, critical education lens, my focus is on the “interplay of education, globalisation, cities, and neoliberalism” (Gulson & Pedroni, 2011, p. 166) considering issues of structure and agency grounded in a phenomenological stance (Coffey & Farrugia, 2014) such as structural inequalities and state power as well as school members’ practices and narratives. The key concern in my work ― following wider questions about socio-spatial configurations in late capitalism ― is to see how elements of local and transnational narratives shape statemaking relationships, configure the associated conflicts, and determine negotiations of everyday life and reimagined futures within a peripheral space of Santiago. I ask, how do the different levels of actors involved in producing the school education space interact, negotiate, and defy each other in the context of multiple crises of inequality? Specifically, how does the layered interplay of statecraft, educational policy, and the school interact with transnational globalisation and neoliberalisation forces in a local space with its own historicisation and cultural political elements producing certain types of subjectivities and imagined futures? Finally, how might this array of complex elements be approached using both theoretical and qualitative case study methodological tools? To address these questions, I propose a sociological and phenomenological-based perspective with the objective of making a contribution to look at these problems with a renewed conceptual toolbox (Araujo, 2021) that could shed some light on the complexities of the historical, cultural, and institutional elements involved in the current landscape of school education in marginalised spaces. In doing so, I bring together decolonial ideas of knowledge production; conceptualisations of the urban space and spatialisation of social phenomena; governance modes in neoliberal times, specifically, the role of governmentality in statemaking; affective readings of the politics of everyday life; and subjectivation process amid social conflicts. To approach the research problem, I use an ethnographic case study methodology, gathering several qualitative analysis techniques. Focusing on one school in a marginalised neighbourhood on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, I put special emphasis on the contextualisation and historicisation of the case study and the close, transversal reading of the narratives of the participants. What I argue with this work is that different governance scales negotiate power with each other to implement policies and produce a form of education that is the most useful for a neoliberal, privatised context. Even when this is the main rationale, tensions still appear with resistance and defiance strategies arising within the spaces of the neighbourhood, the school, and individual narratives. I attempt to illustrate these tensions as they are expressed in forms different to the usual institutional power through affective expressions, collective conviviality, survival strategies, and individualised alternative futures. However, looking at these tensions, my intention is to provide an invitation to shift from individualised survival strategies towards collective understandings of alternative futures, envisioned for and by young people in marginalised spaces and society as a whole.
Global South, Urban marginalisation, Statecraft policies, Youth studies, Affective politics, Education & Skills, Education privatisation reform
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