Policy Press

Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

By Kalervo N. Gulson and P. Taylor Webb

Published

Jul 26, 2017

Page count

160 pages

ISBN

978-1447320074

Dimensions

234 x 156 mm

Imprint

Policy Press

Published

Jul 26, 2017

Page count

160 pages

ISBN

978-1447335214

Dimensions

Imprint

Policy Press

Published

Jul 26, 2017

Page count

160 pages

ISBN

978-1447335221

Dimensions

Imprint

Policy Press
Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula.

It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices.

Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.

Kalervo N. Gulson is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. Relevant work has examined the connections between space and race when theorizing education policy change.

P. Taylor Webb is Associate Professor in the Department of Education, University of British Columbia. His work examines education policy in relation to ideas of neoliberalism, governmentality, and bio- and micro-politics.

Introduction: education policy and multicultural cities;

Policy events;

Policy and biopolitics: the event of race-based statistics in Toronto;

The (micro)politics of racial neoliberalism;

'Up in the northwest corner of the city': the city, race and locating the school;

Difference and recognition;

Policy events, race and the future of the city.