The Democratization of Educational Care: Spatial Imaginaries, Demographic Change, and Black Families Continued Educational Advocacy

ABSTRACT

Too often, Black families’ educational agency has been marginalized in discourse on racial and spatial divides in US education. Indeed, Black families have persistently employed a range of tactics to access and create the educational resources their children deserve. Drawing from scholarship on spatial imaginaries, in this article, I track how Black families have developed democratic and communal outlooks on place-based resources such as public schools. I identify what I term democratization of educational care, or how some Black families’ educational advocacy for their own children broadly benefit all students. To demonstrate these dynamics, I share how Black families’ educational advocacy in a demographically changing suburb of Detroit, Michigan, uplifted the needs of their children, while also seeking to address larger systemic inequities. Implications suggest how school leaders can learn from the positioned knowledge and advocacy of Black families to foster educational equity and care in demographically changing school systems.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Dana Nickson

Dana Nickson is an assistant professor in the Education Foundations, Leadership, and Policy program at the University of Washington. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies the intersections of demographic change, politics of place, and Black families’ educational agency in US metropolitan regions.