Just Innovation problematizes taken-for-granted assumptions about innovation in education as just about new devices like laptops, computers, or smart-phones. It also aims to open conceptual space for considering what is just, or fair in twenty-first century contexts by investigating the cultural politics of digital education reform. Drawing on critical policy analysis and critical sociology of education, I investigate how nonprofit reformers in the California Bay Area designed and organized to achieve distinctive visions of digital education reform. Data includes 53 federal policy texts (1958 – 2016), 11 months of participant-observation at a Silicon Valley nonprofit I call “Accelerate-Edu,” and 13 months of participant observation at an Oakland nonprofit I call “InnovateEquity.”

I argue that digital education reforms that gain legitimacy tend to reify values associated with a white sociotechnical imaginary: a materially-based discourse that deflects attention to past and present forms of racial discrimination, brokers private-public relations centered on enhancing the exchange value of digital technologies, and instantiates individual social mobility goals of schooling. Yet, Just Innovation also points to alternative possibilities for action evident in a Black sociotechnical imaginary; a materially-based discourse that directly confronts past and present forms of racial injustice, privileges the collective use- over market-exchange value of digital technologies, and invites young people to articulate and organize around shared desires for neighborhood transformation.

Just Innovation writes against prevailing policy, scholarly, and popular constructions of digital technology as an inherently liberatory tool and outlines possibilities for civic engagement that contest prevailing relations of power and privilege. I conclude by discussing policy, research, and pedagogical “disruptions” that might contribute toward more equitable and historically responsive twenty-first century educational futures.

This dissertation tracks the production of narratives that frame U.S. universities as ethical institutions. It argues that such narratives –in popular imaginaries and scholarly discourse– rely on elisions of the racial-colonial entanglements of higher education. In linguistics, elision refers to the deletion or omission of sound, explaining historical shifts in a language deemed ordinary to “native” speakers. Conceptually then, each chapter of Ethical Elisions considers the erasures of racial-colonial violence that actively produce commonsense ideas of universities as ethical institutions.

To develop this inquiry, this study examines “the university” at various analytical scales and historical periods: the formation of a world-renowned public Land Grant university system, the University of California, in the mid/late 19th century (Chapter 1); the institutionalization of research ethics itself in the 1970s and its 2018 federal policy revisions (Chapter 2); as well as contemporary campus initiatives to address the racial-colonial histories of specific colleges and universities (Chapter 3). Specifically, Manifest Destiny as the Ethical University: The Coloniality of the UC analyzes speeches and essays of founding UC Berkeley leaders and faculty, which envision knowledge production as a rational mechanism to extend U.S. imperialism into the Pacific. This chapter argues that claims to Manifest Destiny legitimized the development of the state’s nascent system of public higher education, relying on the accelerated context of racialized violence in the fledgling state of California. The second chapter, Research Ethics as the Ethical University: Upholding ‘Colonial Unknowing’ through the IRB takes as its object of study the origin stories surrounding the institutionalization of research ethics policy. It argues that institutional review boards (IRBs) are narrated as a response to cases of exceptional racialized violence, most notably the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research and as such, participate in the active unknowing of the racial-colonial entanglements of research. Acknowledging Racial-Colonial Histories as the Ethical University: The Limits of Retrospective Gestures surveys the forms of institutional acknowledgment of campus colonial histories, considering how historical violences are (un)named or narrated through these processes, and how universities recuperate themselves through forms of acknowledgment. The Afterword considers the limits of knowledge production to rupture frames of liberal justice and touches on the affective dimensions of engaging in a decolonial praxis within, against, and beyond the university.

Methodologically, this work draws from anti-colonial feminisms, settler colonial studies, as well as critical ethnic studies scholars who situate how knowledge production and universities themselves are not merely complicit, but formative in cohering processes of racialized capitalism in the United States. This dissertation also contributes to scholarship within the emergent field of Critical University Studies by moving against liberal imaginaries that recuperate (public) higher education as inherently good or ethical.

This dissertation grapples with dominant ideas of school reform and social

movement making. I argue that school reform efforts that remain within the

discursive and institutional domains of schooling often reproduce social

inequities. This qualitative case study focuses on Adelante, a collaborative effort

among researchers, teachers, community leaders, and first generation Latino

parents, who collectively worked to resist deficit discourses, imagine community

and student success, and mobilize community members and district personnel to

make the schools and community more responsive to the needs of the most

disadvantaged students. This study extends beyond a tracing of modernist

conceptualizations of resistance that define social change as occurring through

organizing oppositional forces against institutional bodies and people in power, to

explore the ways in which Adelante collectively produced a feminist politic of

resistance. This politic rested in the inevitability of failure based on a masculinist

definition of success and turned toward non-modern knowledges and practices as

the ethos from which to organize. This analytic frame attends to the perceived failures, productive tensions and disquieted affect of the organizations’ history of

formation, the process of digital storytelling, the anthology produced, and the

quieter movements of social change.

“Water is Sacred! Women are Sacred!”: Indigenous Womxn’s Embodied Knowledge on the Frontlines engages with the issues of gendered environmental violence by exploring the ways Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous womxn, continue to fight for sovereignty and environmental wellbeing of the Fourth World. The issue of U.S. colonial state attacks against Indigenous Nations and lands have made it mainstream, and the politics of Indigenous Knowledge begs the question of how to best support activists’ work to transmit environmental knowledge while not erasing the connected issue of localized colonial violence that affects, though differently, every major region in the world. To help make sense of the intersections of gendered violence and environmental degradation, “Water is Sacred! Women are Sacred!” explains why and how IK is mobilized, both as an enactment of anticolonial relations and an identity-knowledge-object, in different forms across the frontlines.

I supplemented participatory observations in Indigenous lead activists’ spaces with archival research and over 30 in-depth interviews with Indigenous activists, mostly womxn. The in-depth interviews, ranging from 1 to over 2 hours each, include mothers supporting the movement through digital activism to internationally known leaders in the United States and Canada. I gathered supplementary materials from Indigenous lead conference proceedings, online archives, and the Freedom Archives in San Francisco.

Water is Sacred! Womxn are Sacred! proposes that to reinvigorate knowledge production as an anticolonial process and strengthen our abilities as radical environmental justice pedagogues, scholars must reimagine Indigenous ways of knowing as more significant than and beyond an intervention to sustainability. In documenting Indigenous womxn’s embodied critiques embedded within their analysis of environmental degradation, the dissertation recasts the seemingly new narratives about recognition and decolonization in mainstream sustainability as modes of extraction. The foundational claim is that U.S. American research bent toward the arch of radical transformation must consider settler colonialism as an ongoing process, especially with understandings of knowledge, law, and power.

This dissertation considers the social, political, legal, cultural, historical, temporal, and other contextual forces concerning educational access for young people experiencing forms of state custody and surveillance at the intersections of multipleidentity markers and inquires into efforts to resist injustices. It also explores educational experiences and institutional interactions of youth identified as deviant, delinquent, and/or disabled, with particular attention on youth transferred from juvenile court jurisdictions to adult criminal courts and jails. Most of the research focuses on urban counties in the Midwest, and one chapter presents an analysis of a national landscape.

The primary methodologies are critical policy analysis, critical archiving processes, activist archiving, and archiving activism. Multiple trans-disciplinary critical frameworks inform and accompany this process, including DisCrit, Critical Policy Studies, Critical Horology, Critical Carceral Studies, Method-Making (McKittrick, 2021), and Sara Ahmed’s (2021) interrogation of the complex phenomenology of institutional complaint procedures and complainants' experiences during complaint processes. The analysis exposes disconnects between policy intentions and policy outcomes and the unjust consequences of those policy fractures experienced and resisted by affected young people and their loved ones. It also reveals how carceral logics inform, intersect with, and buttress institutions such as schools and social agencies.