Schooling from the classroom to the state: Understanding schools as geopolitical sites

Christopher Lizotte and Nicole Nguyen
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Christopher Lizotte: University of Helsinki, Finland; Academy of Finland, Finland; Helsinki Institute of Urban and Regional Studies, Finland
Nicole Nguyen: University of Illinois—Chicago, USA

Environment and Planning C, 2020, vol. 38, issue 5, 920-937

Abstract: In this paper, we make a case for situating the school as a geopolitical site. The geopolitical functions of schools and schooling have long been investigated by geographers: forming national citizens, promoting geostrategic discourses, and disciplining populations, to name a few. However, we advocate an approach that is “outward looking,†examining the school not just as a space where these functions are carried out by the state, but as a site where institutional structure, educators, and students exercise agency in complicating the actual implementation of state geopolitical aims. We do this by examining two cases where public schooling has been leveraged by Western states in the service of the post-9/11 securitization of Muslim students in the United Kingdom and France. We argue that these two cases illustrate that schools can be examined not just as containers for state policy, but as explanatory moments in their own right in understanding state geopolitical strategy.

Keywords: Geopolitics; school; education; national security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:38:y:2020:i:5:p:920-937

DOI: 10.1177/2399654420909396

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