UC Santa Cruz

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.