Through an analysis of contestation over neighborhood schooling in New Orleans, this dissertation examines how participation in collective action is impacted by the socio-spatial construction and negotiation of difference. New Orleans has been a testing ground for market-based school reforms that disproportionately affect black families and black geographies: the mass-firing of public school employees, the closure of nearly all of the city’s neighborhood schools, and the institution of autonomous charter schools that are largely unaccountable to the communities they serve. These policies, the way they were instituted, and the narratives used to legitimize them, have provoked intense contestation even as they inhibit collective action. Existing geographic scholarship illuminates how education policy dovetails with other forms of urban neoliberalization to displace poor black and brown residents. In addition, geographers have demonstrated how similar policies in other sectors have short-circuited political contestation. But geographers have not paid sufficient attention to the democratic implications of the racialized socio-spatial violence associated with contemporary school reform, nor to how those affected conceptualize and resist barriers to politics in the context of place-based schooling struggles. As a result, practical and ethical dimensions of an increasingly prevalent form of political struggle remain unexamined, and theorizations of democracy are insulated from potentially important empirical challenges.

I contribute to existing geographic work on democracy, pluralism, and the politics of race/place by refocusing attention on the understandings of participants in collective action, and the active (if always constrained) role that people play in shaping socio-spatial orders. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in New Orleans from 2010 until 2015, I examine how barriers to neighborhood-school politics are erected in New Orleans, how struggles to reopen and/or gain more control over neighborhood schools challenge these barriers, and how participants negotiate ethical conflicts within their own political communities. I argue that dominant school reform narratives deploy both neoliberal and plantation logics that specifically discredit black politics by depicting black places as bereft of value and black people as incapable of self-determination. Yet my research also demonstrates the incompleteness of these political barriers. I find that participants in black-led schooling struggles trouble dominant understandings of violence and failure by circulating counter-narratives that link school reforms to the evisceration of black geographies, the death of black children, and the repudiation of black political subjectivity. Using a Deweyan lens to analyze values conflicts within a political community, I illuminate the ethical complexities associated with participating in place-based politics and place-based practices that allowed participants to “learn to learn” from their engagements across difference.