What I Am Thinking About Now: Mahasan Chaney, “From Paternalism to Punishment: Evoking Educational Opportunity to Discipline Black Poverty”

Please join us for a “What I Am Thinking About Now” presentation by Mahasan Chaney, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Race & Ethnicity at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America (CSREA) and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Her presentation is titled, “From Paternalism to Punishment: Evoking Educational Opportunity to Discipline Black Poverty.”

Abstract: Drawing on federal archival sources, Chaney argues that a primary feature of federally driven anti-poverty education reforms, or “educational opportunity” has been the desire to curb urban disorder and Black rebellion. Since the 1960s, federal policymakers have used educational opportunity (and not other sources of social redistribution) as a key source of racial and economic uplift. In doing so federal policymakers have used a discourse of educational opportunity to characterize urban children as disorderly, criminal, and punishable—a process that ultimately made way for the imposition of more punitive, criminalizing school discipline reforms.

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“What I Am Thinking About Now” is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. All are invited to attend and participate.