Education and Social Change: The Struggles of Schooling in the Slums of the Global South

Abstract

This chapter offers ways to understand education and social change as contemporary struggles that proliferate alongside new geographies of spatial development. A complex interplay of explosive processes of urbanization and marginalization is inseparable from the uneven spatial development that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed and deepened. On the one hand, centrifugal forces exclude populations by enclosing them, and on the other, those populations deploy centripetal forces of their own in the struggle for inclusion, the struggle to get in. Globalization has brought with it a variety of contradictory transformations that translate into an urban reality that is, today, more differentiated, polymorphic, and multiscalar than at any previous cycle of capitalist urbanization. The Global South and North are expressions of a reality fraught with modes of inequality that are by no means linear, let alone fixed and unchanging. Resilience, in these contexts, is not a question of empowerment or will, but a daily reality. In managerial and entrepreneurial times, becoming resilient, persisting (or dying), is a nanoaction embodied in institutions and subjects that live and grow up in a slum. Regardless of the diagnoses of crisis that declare schools useless, there is still a place called a school where students and teachers go to encounter others in an engagement only possible in the educational infrastructure. In times when knowledge seems to dissolve into skills and attitudes, and when virtualization threatens to pixelate education on screens, the struggles for, in, and through schooling deepen as an often-silenced act of resistance.