Thomas C. Pedroni – författare

Across the world, cities are being reshaped in myriad ways by neoliberal forms of globalization, a process of urban restructuring with significant implications for educational policy and practices. The chapters in this collection speak to two complementary but analytically distinguishable aspects of the interplay between education, globalization, cities, and neoliberalism. The first aspect relates to the macro relationships between these powerful global forces on the one hand, and cities and their schools on the other. In particular the book considers the stratifying dynamics that exacerbate already existing inequalities related to race, ethnicity, language, class, and gender—inequalities entailing differential access to the city’s various resources. The second aspect deals with the cultural politics, and logics, of these changes in the city. This recognises that globalization is not simply imposed on the city, but rather becomes insinuated into its fabric through the actions and the agency of local actors and social movements. Against this backdrop, the chapters document how the educational politics of urban contexts in the United States, India, Canada, South Africa and Brazil should be understood as sites in which neoliberal forms of globalization are localised, reproduced, and potentially contested. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Winner of the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA)Through careful ethnographic research, Market Movements represents community leaders, school officials, and most importantly, African American working class families who have used vouchers as a means of removing their children from public schools they deemed unacceptable. The book works to discern the overlaps and tensions between the educational visions of African American voucher families and those of powerful conservative educational forces in U.S. society which purport to be allied with them. To the extent that there are points of divergence with the educational right, and points of convergence with educational progressives, this book provides a hopeful message and a practical vision. It seeks to accomplish some of the critical empirical and conceptual groundwork that is necessary in order to renew the increasingly fractious relations between those social actors—teachers, communities of color, critical researchers, and labor unions—most likely to defend and expand previous social democratic victories.

Winner of the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA)Through careful ethnographic research, Market Movements represents community leaders, school officials, and most importantly, African American working class families who have used vouchers as a means of removing their children from public schools they deemed unacceptable. The book works to discern the overlaps and tensions between the educational visions of African American voucher families and those of powerful conservative educational forces in U.S. society which purport to be allied with them. To the extent that there are points of divergence with the educational right, and points of convergence with educational progressives, this book provides a hopeful message and a practical vision. It seeks to accomplish some of the critical empirical and conceptual groundwork that is necessary in order to renew the increasingly fractious relations between those social actors—teachers, communities of color, critical researchers, and labor unions—most likely to defend and expand previous social democratic victories.