AAG 2018: Towards a critical historical geography of education

Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence of research that has viewed education through a spatial and geographical lens (McCreary et al., 2013; Holloway et al., 2011; Thiem, 2009; Butler and Hamnett, 2007). With certain exceptions however (Symes, 2007; Gulson and Parkes, 2009; Hunter, 2015; Morrin, 2015; Gamsu, 2016), relatively little of this recent work has taken an approach which weaves together history and geography to ‘place education in a trinity of contexts: of time, of place and of society’ (Marsden 1987: 2). Moreover, much work in the new geographies of education has taken as its starting point the unequal spatial dynamics of neoliberalism without always tracing the longer lineages of social and spatial change which underpin current educational inequalities. In this session as part of a broader call for a critical geography of education (Nguyen, Cohen and Huff, 2017), we wish to explore how examining the spatial analysis of education over time can extend our  analysis of the uneven geographies of educational power.
 
Contributors may wish to examine but should not feel limited to the following themes:

• Historical hierarchies of schools and universities and how they have persisted or changed in local neighbourhoods, cities or regions.
• Colonial legacies and how they continue to shape contemporary geographies of education
• The use of history by schools and universities
• Spatial patterns of accumulation of cultural and economic capital by schools or universities
• Neoliberalism and local, regional or national histories – how has neoliberalism interacted with older forms of governance in shaping contemporary geographies of education?
• Land ownership and education – the historical and contemporary role of educational institutions in re-shaping cities through land purchases and sales
• Architecture and education - preservation of historic forms of university or school architecture, creating new pseudo-historical forms of educational architecture.
• Methods to measure educational power over time at different geographical scales
• Dialectics of education – how do city forms and structures combine with education over time? 

Organizers: Sol Gamsu, Francisca Corbalan, and Kirsty Morrin