Space,Place,and Social Justice

Introduction

This article aims to develop an analytical framework for investigating the relationships between space, place, and social justice in education. Two themes form the basis of this framework. The first is the contradictory dynamic of global/local as it plays out in education policy and practice. On one hand, globalization is producing homogenizing effects on the education policies of nation-states, which are increasingly formulated in sight of each other and are increasingly alike. On the other hand, there are inequalities of space and place within countries, such that experiences of education are very different depending partly on local conditions. This global/local tension takes a particularly sharp form in South Africa, where inequalities in education are pervasive, in spite of a constitution that enshrines formal equality and a policy regime that conforms to global trends. The tension between homogenizing policies at global and state levels, and differentiation of policy enactment at local level, provides the first theme for the framework of this article.

The second theme in the framework relates to the particular historical geographies of education, particularly evident in former colonial societies, and their continuing effects in the present. In South Africa, centuries of colonization laid the groundwork for spatialized relations of power, which were extended and formalized by apartheid into a hybrid sovereignty that tied race to place in structurally unequal ways. These configurations of power and opportunity have proven hard to shift in post-apartheid education. Differentiated patterns of access, provision, and performance fall along the lines of historical geography, albeit with blurring forms as race gives way to class in segments of the system. Understanding the continuation of these patterns with a view to shifting them is a major social justice issue for education policy.

The methodological approach developed in this article is based on the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre. In particular, the article explores rhythmanalysis as a research frame for addressing the themes of global/local policy and historical geography in understanding persistent inequalities in South African education. The article begins with an account of Lefebvre’s (1991, 2004) work on the production of space and rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre’s concept of social space opens consideration of the different spatial practices of schooling, the representations of schooling in policy and the everyday experiences of schools in different places. Building on this analysis of space, the article then turns to the broad patterns of South African education and their spatial production to illustrate how these may be understood and investigated. It concludes that a consideration of affordances, understood as the possibilities—material and imagined—that schools offer for action in different places may provide a useful point for working for social justice in education.

Fashioning Space With Lefebvre

Nigel Thrift (2006) argues that the “spatial turn,” which has marked the social sciences and humanities over the past 20 years, may be understood as an aspect of a broader theoretical move toward grappling with what he terms “the unremitting materiality of the world where there are no pre-existing objects” (p. 139). The “things” of the world are, he suggests, “being continually recast by processes of circulation within and between particular spaces” (p. 139). If space is understood as constituted through relationships of continuous and involuntary encounter, this necessarily invites an investigation of the materiality of thinking. For Thrift, this means that “the whole business of praxis and poiesis is wrapped up in the stubborn plainness of things” (p. 140), and that the “energy of the sense catching forms of things” requires serious consideration.

Materialist analysis is not new for theorists informed by frameworks such as Marxism and critical realism. Emphasizing “things” alone does not lead to an analysis that foregrounds space, as Thrift is certainly alert to. The spatial may be recruited into other frameworks as an add-on to society and time, without a major conceptual shift. Indeed, the fashionableness of the “spatial turn” may turn out to mean little more than a new set of metaphors, a new play of language, mapped onto existing work in ways that add few new insights. For spatial theories to add significantly to existing analyses in education, it is necessary to go beyond metaphor to seek different analytical insights and different points for action.

Placing space at the center of the analysis, this article draws specifically on Lefebvre’s work. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre’s (1991) project is to establish a unitary theory that encompasses mental space, physical space, and social space, and to explore the notion of social space aside from the abstractions of space that have come to predominate in social analysis. Lefebvre argues that particular notions of physical space (“nature”) and mental space (formal abstractions of philosophy and mathematics) have enabled space to be conceived of as “absolute” in the Euclidian notion, as an empty container to be filled, or as a “form” to be imposed on physical materiality. These approaches mystify the social activities of space with abstractions that have little to do with the experiences of everyday life.

Lefebvre’s project is to analyze space in terms of the social relations embedded in it, rather than the “things” within it, or space emptied of things. Fragmentation of space into specialist studies (such as geography or architecture) leads to partial representations—“shards of knowledge”—that may serve to turn attention from the social relations that produce space. Lefebvre views this as an ideological distortion, not unlike commodity fetishism, where “products” are separated from their conditions of production. In his words:

Knowledge of space wavers between description and dissection. Things in space, or pieces of space, are described. Part-spaces are carved out for inspection from social space as a whole. Thus we are offered a geographical space, an ethnological space, a demographic space, a space peculiar to the information sciences, and so on ad infinitum. Elsewhere we hear of pictural, or musical or plastic spaces . . . The result is that all focus is lost as the emphasis shifts either to what exists in space (things considered on their own, in reference to themselves, their past or their names), or else to space emptied, and thus detached from what it contains: either objects in space or space without objects, a neutral space. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 91)

Instead of fragmented analyses and abstractions of space, Lefebvre (1991) posits his notion of space as socially produced, amenable to analysis in Marxist terms of productive forces and social relations. He identifies three realms of activities that make up social space: spatial practices (the perceived space of daily realities and routines), representations of practice (the conceptualized space of architects and planners), and representational practice (the experienced space of everyday life and its images). This triad of perceived–conceived–lived (the practical, the symbolic, and the imaginary) is not an abstract model of space or an ideological mediation, but, in his terms, it is “concrete” (p. 40) requiring an understanding of space in relation to the practices that produce it. (In terms of schooling, we may see the routine activities of schools as demarcated spaces, their recognizable design, and the many images of everyday life at school as examples of perceived–conceived–lived activities in the production of space.)

The generic term social space, though apparently singular in form, in fact implies a multiplicity of social spaces and practices. Working against abstractions of space as empty or inert, Lefebvre (1991) posts space as an

encounter, assembly, simultaneity . . . [of] everything that there is in space, everything that is produced either by nature or by society, either through their co-operation or through their conflicts. Everything: living beings, things, objects, works, signs and symbols. (p. 101)

Lefebvre envisages a hypercomplexity of intertwined and overlapping practices, of networks superimposed on others, of movements, flows, rhythms, sequences that interrupt and interfere. Social space includes local places as well as multiple movements, “embracing . . . individual entities and peculiarities, relatively fixed points, movements, and flows and waves—some interpenetrating, others in conflict and so on” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 88). In this approach, the local never disappears into regional or national or global spaces, but continues to exist. There is no expectation of homology across scales; instead, spatial practices are polyrhythmic—each following its rhythm which may cut across, interrupt, or be interrupted by another in a hypercomplexity which is not simply random.

In foregrounding space, Lefebvre (1991) does not underplay the significance of time. Instead, he views time, space, and energy as constitutive of social formations. Space provides a synchronic order, time a diachronic order, and energy a “reality” to social formations (p. 13). In his triadic dialectic, Lefebvre seeks a theory to explain how societies generate their social space and time—their daily realities of spatial practice, their representations of space, and their experiences and images of everyday life. Lefebvre’s unitary approach links an analysis of the forces and relations of production to space and time, to knowledge, and to meaning in the everyday.

Social space consists of webs of relationships that are continuously and actively produced and reproduced in time—relationships of daily routines, representations of these, and the experiences and expressions of them in everyday life. This is set out particularly clearly in Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004), wherein the interplay of linear and cyclical rhythms—polyrhythms, rhythms crossing and interpenetrating each other—produces activities that are simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. Thus, Lefebvre links large-scale marxist analysis of mode of production with phenomenology, so that, as Schmid (2008) points out,

Central to Lefebvre’s materialist theory are human beings in their corporeality and sensuousness, with their sensitivity and imagination, their thinking and their ideologies; human beings who enter into relationships with each other through their activity and practice. (p. 29)

Methodologically, the primary challenge in a Lefebvrean analysis is to apprehend and analyze the rhythms of multiple and complex social relationships inherent in the production of space as continuous encounter. These relationships include historical forms and present practices, latent as well as dynamic forces, objects as well as humans, sounds as well as silences, intimate rhythms of the self as well as outward rhythms of the state-political, imaginary as well as material rhythms, everyday experiences as well as major productive forces.

Lefebvre’s analytic calls for a specific sensibility in ethnographic research, best captured by his own brief description of the hypothetical rhythmanalyst strolling down a street:

More sensitive to times than to spaces, to moods than to images, to the atmosphere than to particular events . . . He is always “listening out,” but he does not only hear words, discourses, noises and sounds; he is capable of listening to a house, a street, as town as one listens to a symphony, an opera. Of course, he seeks to know how this music is composed, who plays it and for whom . . . [A]ttentive to time (to tempo), and consequently to repetitions and likewise to differences in time, he separates out through a mental act that which gives itself as linked to a whole: namely, rhythms and their associations. He does not only observe human activities, he also hears [entend] (in the double sense of the word: noticing and understanding) the temporalities in which these activities unfold. (Lefebvre, 2004, pp. 87-88, italics in original)

The double act of noticing and understanding requires sensual and intellectual attentiveness. It requires the apprehension of everything present at a particular point in time–space, as well as an understanding of the processes of spatial production that extend beyond that point, including historical geographies. Tracing the multiple logics of different rhythms within and beyond the moment is the task of rhythmanalysis. It requires research methods such as observation, interview, analysis of symbols, and documents to be attuned to a particular entendre.

Lefebvre (1991) warns that metaphors and figurative terms need to be used with caution lest they distort the meanings of social space. For example, metaphors of natural space such as “stratum” or “sediment” may imply that space is a “thing,” or that it is inert. Metaphors of boundaries and enclosures may emphasize separation where there is continuity. And, while metaphors of fluidity and flow are evocative in analyzing space, they, too, must be used carefully so that they are understood as analogies rather than theories or concepts.

For the purposes of this article, a Lefebvrean framework offers a number of valuable pointers for researching space and education. First, spatial analysis provides an expanded approach to that of “class–race–gender” in understanding schooling inequalities, which is particularly useful in postcolonial contexts. Second, the triad of perceived–conceived–lived space affords a means for exploring the complex of activities through which inequalities are established, endured, and changed. Third, space-as-encounter provides a frame for exploring the simultaneity of global and local practices as scales that do not necessarily follow the same rhythms. Each of these three points will be explored further in the section that follows.

Schooling and the Production of Space

Turning to the first of the aforementioned points, the persistent inequalities and injustices of schooling experiences and outcomes have troubled sociologists of education for decades. Basil Bernstein’s (1971) conclusion that “schools cannot compensate for society” has proven to be an accurate aphorism. Whether through the lens of structuralism or poststructuralism, reproduction/resistance or power/knowledge, there is no shortage of studies illustrating the enduring patterns of inequalities along the lines of social class, race, gender, and other forms of social disparity. An analysis based on spatial practices is unlikely, of itself, to achieve different overall conclusions, but it may well enable different strategies for action. This is a cautionary point rather than a cynical one, as the work of achieving social justice in education continues to be ethically pressing. Rather, it is to recognize with Foucault (1989/1996, p. 443) that there is no completed state of “liberation” from inequalities. Instead, the task is to strive continuously to achieve “acceptable forms of existence” and “practices of freedom”—strategies for action. Social relations of power are inevitable, but their forms are not, and the task is to work for conditions under which “games of power” are played “with as little domination as possible” (2000, p. 298). This requires continually striving to understand the construction of inequalities, possible moments of fracture and possible pressure points for change. Using Lefebvre’s terminology, it is to discern the ways in which rhythms of practice may be interrupted and counter or alternative rhythms established.

In terms of the second of the aforementioned points, holding the notion of space as central to the production of social formations provides particularly valuable insights into the ways in which inequalities are produced, endured, and may be contested. The notion of space as actively produced within social relations of production—or social relations of production actively produced within spatial relations—adds a richness of theorization as well as potential trajectory for counter-action. This analytic approach is particularly useful in postcolonial contexts like South Africa, where colonial conquest produced very specific and place-related forms of domination and exploitation, in schooling as well as other social practices. The appropriation of land by violent conquest, the subjugation of populations and their incorporation into colonial and neo-colonial political economies has been the topic of much theoretical work, and will not be discussed more fully here. Understanding these processes in terms of spatial production brings different insights into the enduring nature of inequalities beyond liberation—patterns of inequality that are all too evident in South African schooling. This is not to collapse all analyses into an abstract notion of space—the very step Lefebvre abjures—but rather to suggest an agenda for empirical investigation of the range of activities that Lefebvre’s triad of spatial practices addresses. It is to this second point that the article now turns.

In elaborating on the different forms of social space, a Lefebvrean analysis enables more detailed understanding of what space entails. His triad of perceived–conceived–lived enables a more fine-grained analysis of the different activities of spatial production. The historical production of spatial inequalities, their mapping onto representations of space, and the everyday experiences of spatial inequalities brings a theoretical coherence across geography, political economy, society, and culture in understanding the historical production of enduring social patterns of inequality. So, for example, there are the spatial practices of schooling, including the daily journey from home to school (and the accessibility of particular schools to particular communities of students and teachers); the specific routines of practice within schools as demarcated places; the materiality of schools as products of historical social relations; the flow of resources; and so on. There are the representations of schooling: the recognizable architecture of schools and its colonial variants, the images of students and teachers and schools represented in policy documents, the planning of schools to fit their purposes and their environments, the differential attention given to centers and margins. Then there are the lived experiences of schools: the texture of everyday life for students, teachers, parents; experiences of influence or lack of influence over the activities and outcomes of schooling; images of “school days” in the memories of those who have attended them; aspirations of schooling as the “key to the future” for young people; and so on. Lefebvre’s triadic approach enables an analysis of the different practices, conceptions, and experiences of schooling for different individuals as well as the social structures through which inequalities are expressed.

Third, the notion of space as activities, as encounters, as intertwined and overlapping practices, and simultaneously as local places and global flows enable a unitary (but not unified) understanding of the different scales of spatial production. As spatial practices, the activities of schooling are enacted and experienced at the local level in the specific site of each school; they are simultaneously produced in the activities and representations of national policies, which themselves are part of global flows of ideas and images—a global imaginary of education policy, of comparative equivalence as judged by performance on international tests. Each site of practice does not supersede or eliminate the other; sites coexist and collide in complex interplays of encounter. These interplays are amenable to analysis in terms of the particular activities, representations and experiences that make up the production of space. Through foregrounding the relationships of production, these interplays are visible as spatial practices, representations of space and everyday experiences of space (perceived–conceived–lived space) simultaneously and differently produced at different scales. They may be researched through a rhythmanalysis of everyday life in local places, and, as Castells does, through an analysis of turbulent flows of globalization.

Having sketched a broad theoretical and methodological framework for analyzing schooling based on Lefebvre’s work, the article now sets out briefly the application of this approach to schooling in South Africa.

Schooling and Space in South Africa

Apartheid is rightly notorious for its racialization of all aspects of the South African social formation. In terms of the production of space, this may be understood as a racialized political economy of space, and/or the political economy of racialized space. Introduced in 1948 by the Afrikaner Nationalist government, apartheid was in fact the apogee of centuries of violent conquest and segregation from 1652 onwards. It may be understood as a particular moment in the spatial activities of colonialism. South Africa was colonized by Dutch interests and then by the British government, with waves of other European settlers (French, German, Scottish) adding to the “White” population over decades, and imported Malayan slaves, Indian sugar plantation workers, and Chinese indentured mine workers adding to the “Black” population. In the early phase of encounter, Indigenous KhoiSan people were largely decimated and displaced into desert parts of the country, where they remain to this day. White settlers fought a series of bitter frontier wars and other battles with different African tribes who occupied the interior of the country, herding cattle, planting grain, and smelting iron. Over time, different settlement patterns were established by war and accommodation between White groups and African tribes who had historical patterns of land occupation. Africans were successively dispossessed of their land and proletarianized, becoming laborers on farms and mines, and later in nascent manufacturing. The last of the wars of conquest was fought in 1906, by which time the British had taken on and defeated the Boers in the South African War (1899-1901), thereby securing their ownership of the country’s rich mineral resources.

The formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 represented British victory over Boers, but it also represented the formalization of racial and spatial inequalities in the next phase of colonialism. The limited land and franchise rights of Africans were removed, and the 1913 Land Act confirmed the division of land achieved by settler conquest over African inhabitants, enshrining White ownership of 80% of the land. In response to this, the African National Congress was formed in 1912, sending a delegation to negotiate—unsuccessfully—with the King of England. In the ensuing period, segregation was entrenched in the social production of space. “Job reservation” legislation of the 1920s secured employment for Whites at the expense of people of other races, and the ownership of productive forces was securely in the hands of colonizers. Thus, by the time the Afrikaner nationalist party came to power in 1948 with its ideology of apartheid, the groundwork for spatialized relations of power and production was in place, with space already linked to race, and access to opportunities already linked to race and place.

Apartheid legislation extended and reinforced divisions of race, firming the link between race and space. Legislation allocated African people to Bantustans (euphemistically referred to as “homelands”) based on and diversifying the allocations of land of the 1913 Land Act, and drastically curtailing Black access to land. Movement of Black people to urban areas was restricted, and a plethora of legislation controlled the differential entitlements and restrictions of “population registration groups.” Over the years, the ideology of “separate but equal” was formalized into a hybrid citizenship, where Africans were classified according to tribal groups and afforded limited rights in designated “homelands” (but not in “White” areas). In several of these, puppet “quasi-independent” governments were established, laying the foundations for power relations whose legacy of underprovision, inadequacy, and corruption remains beyond their formal dismantling. Bantustans were splintered so that powerful resources—land and minerals—were secured in White hands, and the provision of infrastructure-mapped patterns of occupation. Networks of transport and communication largely bypassed Bantustans, which, as rural areas, were too overpopulated to sustain agriculture. The production of rural marginalization was meticulously planned and neglectfully enabled by apartheid (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

South Africa’s Bantustans (“Independent republics” and “self-governing territories”).

In education, an uneven racial and spatial spread of schools developed, with limited schooling for Africans largely provided by missionaries (see Christie, 1991; Kallaway, 1984). Again, apartheid legislation entrenched and extended existing racial and ethnic segregation. Schooling was brought under government control, and mission schools were closed—except for Catholic schools, which did not acquiesce to government demands. At the time of political transition in 1994, there were 19 different racially based education departments dispensing an unequal system justified by an ideology of cultural and ethnic difference. There were 10 departments for the “homelands” and one for Africans in White areas; provincial departments for White education; separate departments for people classified as “Indian” and “Coloured,” and a national department that set overall norms and standards. The physical provision of schooling as well as per capita finance for students were racially differentiated, with clear priority given to Whites. In the heyday of apartheid, 12 times more was spent on the education of a White child than a Black child; this had reduced to 4 times at apartheid’s end in the early 1990s. Spatial and historical patterns of provision—with the poorest provision being for Africans in rural areas on farms or in Bantustans—laid the basis for deep contours of inequality in education that have proven almost impossible to shift in the post-apartheid period.

By the time of liberation in 1994, White children were given more years of schooling in a compulsory system, had well-resourced schools, were taught by better qualified teachers in smaller classes, and had lower failure and repetition rates. In contrast, schooling was not compulsory for Black students; schools were inadequate in number and poorly provisioned; many teachers were under- or unqualified; retention rates through the system were low, and failure rates were high. In 1996, the first mapping exercise for schooling as a single system showed that 24% of schools had no water within walking distance, 13% had no toilet facilities at all, 69% had no learning materials, and 83% had no library facilities. The greatest deprivation was in rural schools; for example, in the Northern Province, 49% of schools had no water within walking distance, 79% had no toilets, 95% had no library facilities, and 41% needed serious repairs (see Christie, 2008, p. 135). It is this historical geography of schooling that is proving to be so difficult to shift in the postcolonial period.

Democratic governments since 1994 have developed a framework of policies to redress historical inequalities and establish a rights-based system education of equal quality for all (see Chisholm, 2004; Christie, 2008; Emerging Voices, 2005; Fiske & Ladd, 2004; Fleisch, 2008; Frempong, Reddy, & Kanjee, 2011; Gilmour & Soudien, 2009; Roberts, 2005; Soudien, 2007; Van der Berg, 2005, 2007). In doing so, it drew on global exemplars in education and other spheres of governance to fashion a raft of new policies. The Constitution of 1996 enshrines the right to education among other rights, outlaws discrimination, and recognizes 11 official languages. One of the first steps in education policy was to dismantle the racially based departments and replace them with departments based on new provincial boundaries. Norms and standards for school governance and funding, negotiated conditions for the employment of teachers, and an outcomes-based curriculum were among the changes introduced. Over the decades, provision of schooling has expanded, enrollments have increased to internationally respectable levels, and teacher qualifications have improved overall. Yet changes to administrative structures and practices have had to engage with historical patterns of spatial production and these have shown a stubborn resistance to change. Patterns of performance on tests continue to mirror former apartheid departments, and thus, race, place, and rurality. An urban Black middle class has gained access to historically White schools, so that race has given way to class privilege for this segment of the population. Even in these schools, however, racial patterns linger, and overall, patterns of performance remain racially skewed. In short, the spatial practices of schooling in their materiality persist for the majority of the population.

A Lefebvrean analysis draws attention to the different forms of production of these spatial practices. For example, in terms of everyday life, the fact that the majority of Black students attend historically Black schools in the townships and rural areas where they live means that many of their spatial activities have not changed with the change of government. Their marginalization in the production of space has not changed, either in their everyday lives or in their access to government and resources. The government has developed the practice of representing information in terms of provinces, and this masks deeper patterns in the production of spatial inequalities. In education, it masks not only the influence of rurality on provision and achievement but also the influence of historical bureaucracies and lines of power, most specifically in terms of presence or absence of former homeland departments. And it is these patterns in the production of space, I suggest, that form the basis for the experiences of everyday life in schools in different places, and the inequalities that continue.

On the level of governance, a good example of this is the former Cape Province, now divided into the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape, and the Northern Cape under the post-apartheid configuration (see Figures 2 and 3). Education provision and patterns of performance are presented as if produced by the present provincial configuration, with the Western Cape achieving the best results in the country and the Eastern Cape the worst. What is masked in this presentation is that the Western Cape is a small and largely urban province, with a large proportion of former White schools and a small proportion of township and farm schools, many of these former “Coloured.” It is these conditions that produce the good results that provincial governments claim credit for. In contrast, the Eastern Cape is largely rural and agricultural with important but limited industrial activity. Its Education Department has a different apartheid legacy, with most of its schools from the two former “independent homelands” of Transkei and Ciskei, and segments of schools from the former White Cape Education department and the former Department of Education and Training (responsible for Africans in “White areas”). This legacy has had disastrous effects on governance more generally, as well as on schooling. Administratively, the Eastern Cape has collapsed, unable to function across its former divisions and deliver services to the population. In contrast again, the Northern Cape is sparsely populated and includes the small numbers of indigenous KhoiSan, who live largely in conditions of poverty. Its Education Department includes a mix of schools from the former White Cape Department, the former homeland of Bophuthatswana and schools formerly classified “Coloured and African” in townships and on farms. The administration is not always stable, and the provision of schooling and test scores is better than the Eastern Cape, but less good than the Western Cape.

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Figure 2.

Former provinces of South Africa (1910-1994).

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Figure 3.

Present provinces of South Africa, post-1994.

Returning to issues of scale (local, national, and global), a Lefebvrean analysis enables different rhythms in the production of space to be analyzed without being conflated into a single logic. For example, it is evident that local conditions of schooling follow different rhythms across and within the different provincial configurations, urban and rural areas, suburban and farm schools. Bureaucracies at provincial and national levels produce different rhythms of practice that are clearly divergent and not “harmonized.” Global rhythms play out at national and local levels in different ways. The umbrella national policies adopted by the post-apartheid government are colloquially referred to as “Rolls Royce” policies, borrowed and adapted as they are from global templates. These policies have best suited the conditions in former White schools, while serving the majority of the population very poorly. In comparative international tests on mathematics and literacy, South Africa has ranked very low, if not at the bottom, and has consequently decided to withdraw to focus on internal improvements (see Kanjee, 2007; Simkins, 2005; Smith, 2011). In Annual National Assessments introduced in 2011, the great majority of students perform below grade level in literacy/language and numeracy/mathematics at Grades 3 and 6, with the mode in each case being less than 20% (Department of Basic Education, 2011). South Africa continues to benchmark itself and be measured by global organizations such as UNESCO and the World Bank, conforming as required to the reporting regimes of these and other organizations such as Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals. These practices provide a global rhythm to the production of space in South African education. Ironically, these global inspired policies, while ostensibly responding to demands for more open, inclusive, and democratic educational practices, simultaneously heighten inequalities through promoting neoliberal ideologies that favor marketization and individual choice above equity and equality in educational provision.

At the level of local places, everyday life presents polyrhythms of differentiated responses to the changes introduced after apartheid. Privileged segments of the population—urban middle classes, now racially desegregated—produce privileged schooling spaces that are quite different to the spaces of the majority of students in schools in townships and rural areas. Whereas for some students, schooling provides an almost automatic route to higher education, for others, it offers an almost automatic route to marginalization. When places are as specific and different as the examples of the three Cape Provinces illustrate, it is clear that schooling at the local level does not offer all students the same possibilities and experiences, in spite of national policies for education of equal quality; nor are students equally placed in relation to the possibilities schooling may offer. South African education policies recognize the “diversity” of contexts and the need for redress, but these are largely abstract policies with very little traction at school and classroom levels. In terms of research, there are a small number of excellent classroom studies, but, with notable exceptions (such as Dixon, 2011; Fataar, 2007; Jacklin, 2004), these do not address the spatial production of inequalities.

It goes without saying that the architecture of schools, their material provisioning and their location in specific places reflect particular historical geographies of inequality. What requires empirical investigation is the ways in which these historical geographies continue to influence present practices in the spatial production of inequalities at the level of the school. Using a Lefebvrean analysis, the methodological challenge is to investigate the triad of social practices—material, symbolic, and imaginary—that produce predictable patterns of inequalities across different local sites. It is to commenting on this research challenge that the concluding section of the article now turns. The intention here is to outline analytical and methodological considerations, rather than to set out a full research framework.

Investigating the Affordances of Schooling

In investigating how the production of space opens different experiences and possibilities for differently positioned students and their schools, a useful starting point is provided by adapting Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordances. Writing in the context of social psychology, Gibson proposed a mutuality of relationship between animals (including humans) and their environments. He wrote,

The “affordances” of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the environment and the animal. (Gibson, 1979, p. 127)

Stretching the concept of affordances beyond its original use and into the context of schooling provides a particular way of investigating the relationships between schools and their students in the social production of space. Drawing on Gibson’s insights, two complementary questions may be posed about the affordances of schooling: What do schools in different places offer students? And, What do students in different places perceive or imagine that schools offer them? Extended in this way, the notion of affordances highlights the nexus between schools and their students in a way that enables the triadic production of space to be explored: the materiality of schools as social spaces, together with the perceptions and imaginaries of their students. This nexus, I suggest, provides a point where the inequalities of schooling may be identified, with a view to interrupting and working against them.

Operationalizing the concept of affordances within Lefebvre’s approach to the production of space entails investigating the perceived, conceived, imagined “possibilities for action” that schools in different places offer students and that students find in schools. In Lefebvre’s analytic, these are not abstractions; rather, they are grounded in the material production of space within and beyond schools, the production of knowledge, and the production of meaning (see Schmid, 2008, p. 41).

Many practices contribute to the distribution of affordances, and would form part of a research agenda based on a Lefebvrean analytic: the different rhythms of teaching and learning that are evident in different schools, the different bodily gestures that are formed in patterns of repetitive practice (in Lefebvre’s word, dressage), the different relationships to school knowledge that are evident in different schools, symbols and language use in schools, the place-specific activities that engage schools with their local environments, social and economic that are available in different places, and so on. Through analysis and comparison of different schools as social spaces, an understanding may be developed of the distribution of affordances with a view to developing strategies for intervention.

The concept of affordances challenges the researcher to investigate imagination and perception alongside material practices. In considering the significance of perceived or imagined possibilities for action, a number of scholars provide excellent grounding for further exploration of how human beings collectively engage with their futures. These include Mills’s (1959) Sociological Imagination, Cornelius Castoriadis’s (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, and Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) Modernity at Large. Appadurai’s (2004) evocative notion of the “capacity to aspire” links the imagination to culture in a way that resonates with the approach developed in this article:

. . . [it] is in culture that ideas of the future, as much as those about the past, are embedded and nurtured. Thus, in strengthening the capacity to aspire, conceived as a cultural capacity, especially among the poor, the future-oriented logic of development could find a natural ally, and the poor could find the resources required to contest and alter the conditions of their own poverty. (p. 59)

From this brief outline, it is apparent that research on affordances linked to the production of space could draw on rich conceptual work. The challenge is then to frame sociological and ethnographic fieldwork in ways that enable complex and multiple relationships to be investigated in the social production of space, within and beyond the school.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to generate a theoretical and methodological framework based on Lefebvrean rhythmanalysis to investigate the relationships between space, place, and social justice in education. In an attempt to move beyond “space as metaphor,” the article has used Lefebvre’s analysis of the social production of space to develop an approach for researching the complex global/local configurations of education policy, and exploring the continuing effects of historical geography on global, national, and local scales. The power of a Lefebvrean rhythmanalysis, I have argued, is that it enables a study of multiple logics and different scales—unitary but not unified—in understanding the production of inequalities in education, and suggesting possibilities for working for change. The logics of global education policies, with their neoliberal inflections, need to be carefully investigated in relation to local conditions instead of being assimilated as “best practice” into national policies. A Lefebvrean analysis enables these different policy scales to be investigated simultaneously so that their logics are not conflated to produce inevitable inequalities. To analyze spatial relations on the level of the school, the article has introduced the concept of affordances to highlight the nexus between the materiality of schools as social spaces, and the perceptions and imaginaries of their students. Framing affordances within a broader analysis of the production of space enables flows, rhythms, and sequences of activities to be explored at global, national, and local scales, with a view to understanding the multiple rhythms that produce educational inequalities and opportunities for working against them toward greater social justice.