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To be a part of this online event, please email Professor Maren Elfert to receive the link.
Far from producing crises in public schools, COVID-19 has rather uncloaked pre-existing relations between the spheres of production and those of social reproduction. Public schools sit in the interstices of these spheres, being both the dominant form of social reproduction outside the family, as well as the sites of 'production' for 'future labour' required for a capitalist institutional social order premised on constant growth.
This talk explores how the work of Nancy Fraser, along with social reproduction theory, provide a rich language of description for understanding the contradictions inherent in these relations. It will then examine how COVID-19 has made these contradictions more visible to the general public by forcing many to face trade-offs between economic and physical safety. Finally, the talk will look at how many of the proposed responses on the table from national education administrators fail to address the issues that made schools – and society in general – so vulnerable to crises in the first place.
About the speaker
Sara Black is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT), University of Johannesburg, and a research fellow on the Cases of Open Learning (COOL) project, Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), University of Cape Town.
To be a part of this online event, please email Professor Maren Elfert to receive the link.