In this paper I bring together scholarship from the ‘reparative turn’ in the social sciences with the long tradition of critiquing schooling in the sociology of education. Most recently in this tradition, Ball and Collet-Sabé (2021) argue convincingly that the modern school is an ‘intolerable institution’ bound in its very epistemology to reproduce conditions of future uncertainty and inequity. I draw on Hong’s (2014) framing of neoliberalism as a process of erasure and disavowal in order to link Ball and Collet-Sabé ’s contention with the concept of reparative futures (Sriprakash et al. 2020). I do so through a consideration of my 2014–15 ethnography of Bronx High, a public high school in New York City. Through the story of seniors at Bronx High, I demonstrate how schooling is profoundly oriented towards particular anticipatory practices - namely, a modernist, neoliberal reckoning of the future that is both illusory in its promises and unsustainable in its ambitions. Bronx High exemplifies the deleterious impacts of living in a future-oriented present that appears wilfully detached from injustices of the past. However, this is not the whole story. The day-to-day actions of teachers and students reveal complex, multiple engagements with future-reckoning, including moments, often at the ambivalent margins of practice, where reparative futures-thinking offers a different way of engaging with the past, the present, and life after high school.
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Alexander, Patrick
School of Education, Humanities and Languages
Year of publication: 2023Date of RADAR deposit: 2023-12-19