Abstract
Given normalized patterns of state disinvestment in communities of color, what research methodologies might scholars enact to intervene in and transform the material conditions of urban schools and communities? Stovall’s Born out of Struggle: Critical race theory, school creation, and the politics of interruption offers one possibility. Drawing on a multiyear struggle alongside Chicago communities of La Villita and North Lawndale, Stovall offers a rich and humble account of his participation in a community-driven effort to establish a school for social justice. This review offers a glimpse into the uneven and contested process of justice organizing that Stovall documents and explores how a “politics of interruption” might extend beyond Chicago to other place-based efforts to advance educational and social change.
Stovall introduces his account by depicting the embodied dimensions of struggles for quality schooling—that of 14 community members sacrificing their bodies and resorting to chicken broth, water, and juice for nearly 3 weeks to demand Chicago Public Schools (CPS) build at least one of four new schools in the Greater Lawndale neighborhood. Stovall uses this account to situate his core theoretical contribution concerning a “politics of interruption,” which he defines as “the ways in which community members from La Villita and North Lawndale actively resist and navigate local and state power in demanding quality education” (p. 12). In addition to hunger strikes, a “politics of interruption” entailed practices of disrupting Mayor Richard M. Daley’s media promises (and even showing up at the mayor’s house for family dinners), conducting “sleep-ins” at Chicago Public School central offices, and implementing critical pedagogies to trouble deficit narratives of urban youth of color. By grounding his account within the everyday lived experiences of urban communities, Stovall asks how theory, in his case, critical race theory (CRT), might “make real its connection to the material conditions of people’s lives?” (p. 11). The remainder of the book details Stovall’s critical and self-reflexive efforts to partner with community members from La Villita and North Lawndale and answer this question.
Chapter 1 traces how de jure and de facto racism created barriers to community solidarity and organizing. This chapter importantly historicized interpersonal tensions between La Villita, a primarily Latina/Latino community, and North Lawndale, a primarily African American community. As Stovall recounted, it was difficult to convince community members from La Villita to share a school with North Lawndale since the hunger strike emanated from La Villita and given broader tensions between the two communities rooted in histories of segregated housing and schooling policies. This chapter uses historical analysis to build on recent scholarly critiques of taken-for-granted categories, such as “community” (Nygreen, 2017) or “public” (Merry & New, 2017), which are often romanticized constructs set against anything that is “private,” “market,” or “neoliberal.” Stovall details how visions for educational justice do not emanate from harmonious, democratic processes but rather from within contested, place-based struggles that require pedagogies of healing (Ginwright, 2010).
Chapters 2 and 3 shift from a macrohistorical view to a meso-analysis of the tensions inherent in processes of establishing the Greater Lawndale High School for Social Justice (SOJO). A key theme in these chapters pertained to the perpetual onslaught of barriers that members of the Transition Advisory Committee (TAC) encountered in their efforts to establish a social justice school. For many activists and organizers, these barriers will read as familiar efforts to curtail community participation. Stovall details how CPS’s rushed timelines, one-size-fits all modes of engagement, and an overall lack of empathy with the working lives of many parents and residents from communities of color challenged the team’s efforts to preserve the principles of justice that emanated from the hunger strike.
Amid these political and bureaucratic barriers, Chapter 4 illustrates the “nuts and bolts” of opening a school, and Chapter 5 takes the reader into Stovall’s high school course called, “Education, Youth, and Justice.” I found Stovall’s extension of a “politics of interruption” to the school and classroom a helpful way to theorize the broader significance of emancipatory pedagogies. For Stovall, teaching simultaneously works to create material opportunities for young people, while also challenging deficit narratives of urban youth of color broadly. An additional highlight of the chapter included Stovall’s account of writing “A Twenty-Eight-Person Article”; a collaborative unit in which Stovall coauthored a publication with his entire class drawing on course concepts of social justice, education, and conflict (pp. 117-118).
Chapter 6 synthesizes lessons learned from the process of creating SOJO. Readers interested in ethical research with grassroots organizations will find this chapter illuminating, especially, as Stovall traces the “messy imperfections of community engaged research” (p. 137). According to Stovall, even in his efforts to move from “subjects and sites” toward methodologies that wrestle with lived experiences of inequities (p. 130), research processes remained uneven, complex, and contested. As one example, Stovall reflected on his need to remain vigilant amid constant efforts by CPS to speak directly with him as the “professor”; a reading that Stovall admits was ironic and misguided as other members of his team were perhaps more agreeable candidates for negotiation. Drawing on radical scholarship (Smith, 2012; Yamamoto, 1997), Stovall and theorizes his own practices as “struggle”: A scholarly praxis that eschews institutionalized research practices of individual career advancement in favor of naming spaces and events that speak to a legacy of overt and covert exclusion of communities of color (p. 129).
In Chapter 7, Stovall concludes with a sobering account of CPS’s efforts to destabilize SOJO. After firing SOJO’s original principal for “violating” residency requirements (p. 99)—a stipulation that was loosely enforced but in SOJO’s case, strictly applied—CPS then required SOJO to eliminate five teacher positions, the assistant principal, literacy coach, and a college counselor. These precarious labor conditions destabilized SOJO and contributed to nearly one third of staff turnover. Reflecting on CPS’s efforts to subvert SOJO, especially, in relation to other reform initiatives and charter schools within CPS, Stovall summarizes, “Through a very engrained technology of racism as state policy, the most radical of educational projects are soon framed as failures, while corporate ‘reformers’ are not only given the opportunity to fail, but fail on numerous occasions” (p. 139). Despite these setbacks, Stovall concludes by discussing the recuperative efforts SOJO staff engaged in and the perpetual and honorable vocation of research and organizing that can support efforts to keep schools like SOJO viable and thriving.
For these reasons (and many others that this review leaves wanting), Born out of Struggle has made an imprint on educational research conversations. Scholars have extended a “politics of interruption” to theorize Latina mother activists (Velazquez, 2017), equitable, community-based educational leadership (Green, 2017; Scheurich et al., 2017; Welton & Freelon, 2018), and curricular and classroom experiences for Chicana/Chicano students (Bernal & Aleman, 2017). These early works speak to the explanatory significance of Stovall’s theoretically grounded research. In the remainder of this review, I aim to build on these recent contributions by raising questions that emerged in my reading of the text, specifically, concerning three themes: (a) the justice possibilities of schooling and “school creation,” (b) the effective naming of state strategies that normalize racial projects of disinvestment and that make a “politics of interruption” necessary, and (c) broader questions about engaged scholarship and preparing engaged researchers to navigate community and university contexts.
First, I wondered about Stovall’s use of the phrase “school creation.” Although community members of La Villita and North Lawndale imagined and materialized a community-based school, they created SOJO drawing on several assumed, institutionalized features of schooling, such as age-segregated classrooms, grades, and Carnegie units; what Tyack and Tobin (1994) refer to as, “the grammar of schooling.” Like prior school reform efforts, including the Dalton Plan (1911), the Eight-Year Study (1933-1941), or High Schools of Tomorrow (1960; Tyack & Cuban, 1995), SOJO troubled this “grammar”—for instance, by enrolling students with low GPAs in Advanced Placement (AP) courses or by crossing disciplinary boundaries and combining social justice with math curricula. These “interruptions” invited suspicion and critique from CPS in ways that threatened the school’s survival. These historical examples raise two questions. First, what role might engaged researchers play in enacting a “community knows best” approach while simultaneously incorporating historical examples about the reproductive tendencies ingrained in how we think and talk about “schooling” (Labaree, 2011)? Furthermore, if a fundamental feature of “the school America builds” includes ranking and sorting students in ways that tend to perpetuate broader meritocratic ideals and sociopolitical structures (Koyama, 2010; Varenne & McDermott, 1999), what are the justice possibilities within “school creation” efforts? Notably, SOJO worked to support individual students while simultaneously organizing for systemic change. And while Stovall articulated his concerns working within CPS and within the given aims and requirements of schooling, I wondered how community imaginaries of educational and social change might have been curtailed or “schooled” by prevailing rules that define what constitutes a “real school” (Metz, 1990).
Second, although the concept of a “politics of interruption” was useful and clearly theorized across distinct community, school, and classroom contexts, I was surprised how much Born out of Struggle chronicled strategies of power, strategies “from above”—the perpetual delays and obfuscation practices that CPS used to normalize a climate in which the educational and social futures of Black and Brown youth do not matter. I am searching for a way to name these practices as my own research with a justice-oriented and people of color–led organization in Oakland has encountered similar barriers to justice organizing. Recently, Aggarwal, Mayorga, and Nevel (2012) draw on environmental justice scholarship and theorize the notion of “slow violence”—the less spectacular but subtle ways injustices are normalized over generations (Nixon, 2011). They use the concept to name the slow and seething ways in which a neoliberal transformation of schooling subverts equitable educational opportunities for young people of color. This concept offers one way to name CPS’s practices, but again, I wonder how Stovall might theorize CPS’s strategies that tend to maintain durable systems of structural racism given that “slow violence” does not fully resonate with the empirical examples he offers. School closures and staff firings were not entirely “slow” but rather immediate and pressing; a dimension Stovall captures well in his field notes: “Shit is too serious. Treat this with the utmost seriousness. Lives are in the balance” (p. 90). In an effort to name practices that reproduce inequities and historic patterns of marginalization, how might we theorize those strategies that make “interruptions” necessary? Naming strategies of power might support engaged researchers in theorizing across cases, and more pragmatically, in supporting community organizers to not merely anticipate but expect attempts to undermine their efforts.
Last, and perhaps residing somewhat beyond the scope of the book, I wondered how Stovall imagined training graduate researchers to inhabit a practice of scholarship as “struggle.” A compelling dimension of Stovall’s account is his integration and willingness to write from multiple subject positions. At times, Stovall writes as a father and concerned citizen whose “heart and soul is riding on this little school” (p. xii). Elsewhere, he foregrounds his credentials as a professor of policy to gain credibility and to be heard from people in positions of power. All the while, he troubles colonial relations between communities and universities and admits that his own privilege, institutional position, and grant funding afforded access to sustainable and ethical work in partnership with communities. The multiple dimensions of Stovall’s positionality informed my own efforts to develop a research sense of self that coheres with how I understand myself as a community member, husband, brother, grandson. Wary of the institutional constraints of community-based justice work (Ellison & Eatman, 2008), I aim to develop practices and a sense of self that straddles university and community boundaries. To date, metaphors of researching as a “secretary of social movements” (Apple, Ball, & Gandin, 2009) have been most helpful in organizing my dissertation-related practices in ways that align with my ethics and interest in conducting rigorous research that simultaneously supports existing community-based struggles. I wondered how Stovall might theorize lessons from his own community-based research to inform curricula or programmatic designs for inducting engaged, community-based researchers interested in existing within perpetually fraught institutional contexts.
In summary, Born out of Struggle is a powerful text. It can be read by activists exploring new tactics for doing justice work, undergraduates curious about the constraints and possibilities of school reform, teachers exploring ways to deepen dimensions of activism and justice in their classrooms, and graduate scholars interested in ways to make our theories more relevant to the lives of the communities we write about. This is the kind of scholarship that hovers low to the material conditions of community life and develops theory that intervenes in the world. It is a contemporary example of research that enlivens what Horton and Freire (1990) imagined in We Make the Road by Walking—politically engaged research that is deeply informed by and responsive to communities with most at stake in the dismantling of structural inequities.
