ABSTRACT
This chapter contends that the global forces of the contemporary socio-economic order are serving to redefine such previously dominant terms in educational study as urban, suburban, and rural. In effect, everything is being urbanized. Applying the theoretical lens of a specific subset of theoretical work in the discipline of geography-critical geography-and its insistence on the simultaneous attention to space, place, power, and identity, this chapter offers beginning attempts at taking “the spatial” aspects of these forces seriously in the study of the lived experiences of schools. This process of redefining/restructuring-a distinction between urbanization as process and urban as lived experience-then calls into question notions of equity and social justice (particularly in seeing the urban as a part of broader moves that encompass the whole of the social fabric). In the larger field of geography, questions have arisen in thinking through what a concept of “spatial justice” might mean, and efforts at rethinking citizenship within global sets of forces give rise to considering differing notions of democracy and identity, and event the resurgence of cosmopolitanism as an ethical framework. Indeed, as we explore the amorphous term “globalization,” we are reminded that “the social spaces of contemporary capitalism
are being increasingly politicized; space is no longer merely the theatre of political conflict but its principle stake” (Brenner, 1997, p. 152). It is here where the work of social foundations of education and educational theorizing must take these processes seriously. The intensified politicization of the spatial and how that plays out in schools and in the lives of children now becomes the terms of our engagement. The interplay between pedagogy and place serves as a locus of attention requiring spatial analysis and a theorizing informed through the lens of a critical geography.
