Navigating Precarity in Educational Contexts

This volume offers a timely collection of research-based studies that engage with contemporary conditions of precarity across an array of locations, exploring how it is understood, experienced, and acted upon by educators in schools, universities, and nonformal educational spaces. Precarity presents as layered, unpredictable, destabilizing, and rapidly shifting sociopolitical and economic dynamics, shown here in various forms, including the global pandemic, divisive populist politics, displacement of refugees and the landless, race and gender injustices, and neoliberal policies that constrain educational and social possibilities. Grouped around reflection, educational practice, and social activism, the authors show how educators engage these precarious conditions as they work toward a more interconnected, humane, and just society. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in social foundations of education, multicultural and social justice education, educational policy, and international and comparative education, sociology and anthropology of education, and cultural studies within education, among other fields.

Karen Monkman is Professor Emerita of Education at DePaul University, USA. Ann Frkovich is Associate Professor in the Department of Research at Concordia University, USA. Amira Proweller is Associate Professor and Program Director in the Department of Teacher Education at DePaul University, USA.

1. Navigating Education in Precarious Times, Part I. Precarious Entanglements: Situating the Self, 2. No Hablo Español: Contributions to the Loss of the Spanish Language Among Latinxs in the United States, 3. Invisibility and Hypervisibility of Arab American Female Students in Times of Heightened Anti-Arab and Anti-Islamic Sentiment, 4. Searching for Belonging: How Transnationalism Influences Chinese American College Students' Ethnic Identity Construction, 5. Reflections on Privilege, Oppression, and Possibilities in Times of Radical Change, Part II. Educational Practice in Precarious Spaces, 6. Shifting Fields: Japanese University Students' Habitus During the COVID-19 Pandemic, 7. The Classroom as a Space for Power and Healing: Examining the Case of New York City After Trump's Election, 8. Vignettes From the Underground: The Difficulty of Challenging Educational Spaces, 9. Fleeing Home, Finding Home, and Chasing Dreams: Refugee Journeys to New Spaces for Belonging, Part III. Pushing Back Against Precarity, 10. From Embodied to Spectral: Teaching Transnational Feminisms in Times of Protest and Pandemic, 11. Activists' Use of Trauma-Informed Frameworks: Insights from Popular Education Spaces in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 12. "Stones One Day, Flowers the Next": The Struggle for Itinerant Schools in the Landless Workers Movement (MST), Brazil, 13. Radical Consciousness and Movements in Defense of Black Lives: The Lineage of Detroit's League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Promise of Education for Liberation, 14. Precarity in Educational Spaces: Reflecting Back and Moving Forward