Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Great Recession, mobilizing mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side while solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private. Here, Aggarwal is joined in conversation with Sabina Vaught.
“A must-read to understand the racialized violence inherent within one of the most fundamental aspects of education in the United States: the logic of choice.” —Damien Sojoyner
“Read this book, and be moved and transformed.” —Sabina Vaught
Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Great Recession, mobilizing mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side while solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private. Here, Aggarwal is joined in conversation with Sabina Vaught.
“A must-read to understand the racialized violence inherent within one of the most fundamental aspects of education in the United States: the logic of choice.” —Damien Sojoyner
“Read this book, and be moved and transformed.” —Sabina Vaught
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Choice came to be understood as not only just the way things are, but the way things would always be to some degree. That it really constrained how we imagined not just history, but then potential futures.
Sabina Vaught:
I think my job is to ask sort of ever more complicated questions, but not to arrive at succinct or comfortable answers. And methodologically, that's really hard.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Hi. My name is Uju Agarwal, and I'm author of Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education.
Sabina Vaught:
And I am Sabina Vaught, and I am here to be in conversation with Uju about this, wonderful book published by the University of Minnesota Press, and I'll also share that I, have a coauthored book with the press, The School Prison Trust, with Brian Brayboy and Jeremiah Chin. So I'm so excited to be in this conversation with you, Uju.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. So am I. Thank you so much, Sabina, for being part of this conversation with me and for the many ways you've been part of the journey of this book.
Sabina Vaught:
Absolutely. It's been a gift to be part of this. We're thinking both about people who've read the book, but also maybe listeners who haven't yet. And so I wanna start by getting into some of the core ideas, the sort of core concepts of the book. And very early on, page nine, you conceptualize this framework of partitioned publics, and you write, partitioned publics are, quote, the embeddedness of a market based infrastructure within the realm of the public that requires competition and cultivates a myopia of consumer citizenship, ensuring that conditional inclusion anticipates and is predicated on exclusion and inequality resulting in the continued production of hierarchical and racialized group differentiation.
Sabina Vaught:
That's such a beautiful and clear and sophisticated conceptualization, and I imagine that people would be excited to hear about the multiple global forces that came into shaping that and the theoretical traditions in which you're deeply engaged that shape that. So I'm wondering if you would just talk a little bit about partition publics.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Sure. Thank you for that question. Maybe what I'll begin with is backing up a little bit to how I got to some of the questions at the heart of this book and with what I'm trying to unsettle about thinking about choice and how I arrive at partition publics. As you know, I came to many of the questions through a lot of years of work as a community organizer, with others working to build a community, organization called the Center for Immigrant Families, a collectively run community based popular education center of poor and working class immigrant women of color and community members in Manhattan Valley, in New York City. And as our organizing grew, we were increasingly focused on the intersection between gentrification, intensified public school segregation, and school choice.
Ujju Aggarwal:
One of the things that, was important for us was that we understood our work to really be about fighting for schools that would reflect, serve, and respect the communities that they were part of. And so in that way, we understood our work to be fighting for something that didn't exist yet, kind of like all community organizing does, right, for a vision that was really about enacting the type of social transformation that we worked for. And also trying to creatively engage a contradiction of what it meant that some of these very same institutions that had been places of harm for many and neglect were places that we were working to transform. At the same time, in the context of gentrification, aggressive gentrification hitting the community, we understood the fight for public schools to really be tied to the fight for over place and community. So my own research really tried to follow some of the contradictions, that, we encountered in the course of this work, where the dominant kind of narrative was telling us that the problem we needed to fight was privatization.
Ujju Aggarwal:
And that wasn't untrue, but it also didn't always fit people's experiences. And so then there was a question of, well, how do we figure out how to actually take what we're learning from the ground, from people's experiences, from our own encounters, and make a theory that fits that? A lot of these contradictions grew even more pronounced in the wake of the great recession when in response to the violence of austerity that was being pushed forward, particular across in lots of school districts across the country, in New York City, particularly, this meant sweeps of school closings in black and brown communities, but also meant a concerted effort by district officials and others to expand choice based policies, in the public schools, particularly the public elementary schools. Choice at the time meant magnet schools, gifted and talented programs, dual language programs, charter programs, general education programs, the list goes on. Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
And the expansion of these choice policies was often done with the mindset of kind of courting families with economic capital on their side, who were considering at that moment, thinking about making their switch. Right? Everybody was kind of in a more in an increasingly precarious financial situation, and that was relative depending on where you were located, of course. But, there was this new quote, unquote market that people were looking to maybe capitalize on. Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
Under the guise of saving public education, was how it was narrated, was to say, okay. This is gonna save our public schools. And while a greater investment of more and more people in public education may sound like a good thing, it really ended up meaning increased, exclusion for poor and working class families in the district, in which I worked, and later came to research where public schools had been kind of, again, a place of neglect and often harm, right, state neglect and otherwise harm. So there was this strange moment in which, on one hand, these places, these spaces, these state infrastructures that no but very few people seem to care about, except those who did try and make a place out of them. All of a sudden came to be about encroachment, or some people described it maybe hedging your bets.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Right? Getting in on the ground, investing before this valuation of the school went up before it became super competitive to get into. So that was, I think, countered again by this understanding as one kind of participant, longtime tenant organizer in New York City public housing put it that public schools represented kind of, quote, unquote, the last of it, the last of it in a place that was already, as somebody else kind of put it, Christina in the book kind of, narrates a place that was already not important. So one of the things I tried to kind of follow through this framework of partitioned publics was the differential rights claims that people made as they worked to navigate, access to public schools and the different meanings of the public that came out of that space. Through the framework then of pub partitioned publics, one of the things I try to center or destabilize is how partition, which represents kind of an ongoing, and relational contingent separation.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Right? One that is ideological and material on one hand that is also kind of ongoing and so not yet complete that works through scales of political and legal rights, but also through a cultural logic makes us push back on this idea that it is only privatization of an otherwise, quote, unquote, public good that we need to push back against. I'm trying to also work at this boundary, or supposed binary between the public and private, between the market and the states, between the consumer and the citizen, to really think about how does that expand, how we see neoliberalism, how we map it, how the state is not simply an administrator of an expanding private realm, but instead, how neoliberalism, or logic of neoliberalism was really tied to the structuring of rights as individual private choices in the post Brown period. The entrenched market within the public that engenders a consumer citizenship within each of us that really curtails how we imagine ourselves in relation to each other, the type of public we can even imagine. It works at multiple scales from the scale of legal and political rights, from the scale of social relations, the kind of cultural logic that engenders, but really kind of it lives within us as well at the level of our political imaginations or what we imagine might be possible.
Sabina Vaught:
One of the things that strikes me about partition as a, as you said, incomplete kind of ongoing scalar process is that while you're describing a very particular place and a time, It also has global reach. And I wonder if you wanna talk about you know, we often in, I think, in so called US based educational studies, get rightly accused of being insular, exceptionalizing the The US, whether it's in the critique or in the praise or, you know, in the observation of the problems. I think one of the possibilities here is to observe the ways in which this is so focused in one location and yet so drawn from global practices so that it's not derivative and exceptional, but in fact, tapping into these larger histories of partition. And I I wonder if you wanna talk about that.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. No. Thank you for that question. I mean, I really agree with, kind of the critique that you're raising around, US Education Studies. I think one you know, I mean, my reference to partition comes from two places.
Ujju Aggarwal:
One is Lenin, and then the other is kind of, right, my own family's experience with the framework and term, which was something I grew up with kind of hearing about and was, I think, always I understood, I didn't understand why other people didn't understand it. And so because it was such a kind of active and ongoing separation of people that had to be justified through violence, through ideology, through border making, through all of these structures in an ongoing way that was never very stable, that push back against, that people's own experiences didn't necessarily always fit within. It was a helpful term to me in terms of, on one hand, think about what we were struggling for and against was connected to, as you're saying, other global struggles. Right? And kind of the work on the ground.
Ujju Aggarwal:
What was the work on the ground that people were really trying to do in place, even in distinct places? How is that connected? Right? And on the other hand, push back against this very kind of normative way that segregation choice came to be understood as not only just the way things are, but the way things would always be to some degree. Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
That it really constrained how we imagined not just history, but then potential futures.
Sabina Vaught:
So I think your description of encountering people's unfamiliarity or confusion around the idea of partition is such a beautiful segue to the next question, which is around this framework of forgotten places. Around page 45, you really animate this framework of forgotten places. And I'm I'm wondering if you wanna go there or you wanna just talk broadly about why that framework is important to why it's connected to partition, why it's important to think about this set of interrelated questions that you're addressing across scale as people sort of relationally make place.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. Thank you, Sabina. The idea of forgotten places comes from Ruth Wilson Gilmore's framing of it, really connected to this idea of the twinned forces of organized violence and organized abandonment. Right? So it's never kind of accidental.
Ujju Aggarwal:
It's not just forgotten, but it is born out of that and out of the dialectical process of also then capitalist development, right, that capitalist development and racial capitalism necessitates. And so I think there was this question of what did it mean on one hand that people were working to make collective life in a an otherwise forgotten place, again, marked by organ the kind of twin forces of organized violence, organized abandonment, and hanging on the balance, a very delicate balance between state infrastructures of schools and housing that allowed for this kind of provisional collective life that people were forging in this place. And then one of those things kind of falls out of balance, comes to be a space of quote, unquote investment and literally investment, encroachment in other words. Right? And and so there's this idea again, of what does that mean, is is, again, Christina put it that something that was already not important just got killed.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Right? And so so thinking about then, what does that tell us? And again, going back to what you were saying earlier about shifting away from the dominant discourse or kind of exceptionalism or maybe narrowness of some of the ways education studies has been, practiced to really think about, well, what does that tell us about what people are fighting for when they are fighting to protect their public schools? They're not fighting for like, people are not duped. I think there is a way that sometimes people would certain political organizers might say, well, that's, you know, not the right fight, but I don't know who's to determine that.
Ujju Aggarwal:
And I think part of the question for all of us then is to consider again this, well, how do we understand more broadly about what people are fighting for versus what it appears to kind of be the demand?
Sabina Vaught:
Right. So what they're fighting for. And and in that, you really talk about and listen to the how. So the the what they're fighting for, as I read, is anchored in how they're fighting and how they're fighting together. And I think that takes us to this framework of care.
Sabina Vaught:
So you talked about, and just now, sort of provisional collective life. And, you know, you talk about care throughout, but on page one zero three, you really start talking about mapping care or kind of assert that framework for mapping care. And so I'm curious if you would think about you know, you've talked about partitions and borders and the place making, what's what's the sort of importance of the geography of this provisional collective life, the geography of care, particularly in that twinned organized abandonment, violence, neglect, etcetera, that makes a place called a forgotten place or experienced as a forgotten place or as as a a place where things are killed, as you quoted Christina saying. So that's a long winding way of saying, I'm excited to hear you talk about the sort of geography of care in relation to these other, observations and questions that you've shared.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. No. Thank you. I learned so much about how to think about care and dialogue with you. So thank you for helping me.
Ujju Aggarwal:
It was kind of a few things. One was that so the women I accompanied in my research at a Head Start center was a kind of intergenerational community that was bounded by both geography and income. And part of the significance of that was that people had accompanied each other, not just through their children being in preschool, but, through life. Right? Many of the women at the Head Start center were former parents there.
Ujju Aggarwal:
They literally made life together in many ways. And again, that's not to say, I feel like people sometimes ask, well, it was just a happy community. No, not at all. You know, but it was a community where people did understand each other and of life more generally beyond each other as non disposable. One of the things we kept coming up against in this space as we were kind of navigating again the increased exclusion that choice was enacting, the expansion of choice policies was enacting with people saying, well, it's that, you know, you have to do the right thing.
Ujju Aggarwal:
You have to kind of like, these parents who gain access, parents with economic capital on their side, you know, they really care. And that hit up against the women at the Head Start Center. In a particular way, it hit up against all of us because how is unequal access and exclusion defined as care that didn't really make sense? And it was defined as such by parents, by school officials, administrators, others. Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
So it was kind of a lot of people in the mix kind of using this language. At the same time, care was mobilized. It felt like two also then makes sense. And Cindy Katz brings this up, right, in her work, this idea that capitalism requires increasing precarity always. And so in the space of increasing precarity, I found that in some places, particularly amongst those with, economic capital on their side where they had forged kind of schools that women at the Head Start Center could often not gain access to that were maybe grounded in progressive pedagogy or otherwise defined, the space of care became more and more individualized.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Right? It became more and more about how do you do this job that is never complete, right, for you on one hand of caring right, and yet the space of care shrank and shrank and shrank and shrank. And so it became increasingly individualized. It became increasingly narrated also and understood outside of the material conditions that produced it. Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
So it was about care producing security somehow as if it could do so. Because if it could do so, then the world might look different. But, but anyway, so that was what I encountered in one space. And then at the Head Start Center, it was what happens despite boundless care and precarity in so many kind of dimensions. How do you measure that?
Ujju Aggarwal:
You can't, and that's not really the goal, to create another index. But what it did really make evident was that contrary to these other spaces where care and the space of maybe care and social relations was again shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, In the space of the head start center, it not only was, practiced as more expansive beyond an individual family or any individual kind of case, there was also an understanding where individualism was understood to be something that was a threat to safety. Not only did the women at the Head Start Center often name choice as false, as a setup, as something that was, like, not true. When, Trump was president and there were a number of raids going on in schools, even though New York City is supposed to be a sanctuary city, this was still going on. Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
And we know kind of the limits of sanctuary as well. But one of the things that we were doing was kind of making emergency plans, one morning at the Head Start Center. And as we started making them, people were mapping the relationalities of and structures that really were part of daily life, part of social reproduction as it happened. And I think one of the things that that showed was, well, in that case, it was also that legal rights, political rights rarely do protect us, but it was another instantiation of people recognizing and knowing that it is through our relationalities that we forge those communities of safety and protection for each other. So, yeah, that was one of the things.
Ujju Aggarwal:
If I tried to map through this idea of care, and it really I think one of the things that I found really helpful to kind of keep coming back to was this quote by Selma James, where she really pushes back on this idea that it's a personal that's political and tries to reground us in this idea that it's really the political that shapes our personal lives, that gives shape to our personal lives and how we imagine and enact our social relations. So in doing that, I think it helps to also then shift away from this idea of, well, everybody cares, the problem, you know, how how do we fix the broken system and so forth, to really thinking about how are our relations really shaped by this system of choice embedded in racial capitalism, necessitating enclosure. And also then I think one of the things, you know, that I find hopeful is that in a lot of organizing spaces that I've been in, there's this never ending conversation between, do we work through the state or do we work through prefigurative politics? Right? As if the two are in contradiction.
Ujju Aggarwal:
They might be, but they're not necessarily antagonistic. Right? They might and they might be antagonistic at different times and places, but they're not necessarily so. And so I think one of the things that I find hopeful again through, again, this space, many other spaces, it's not an exceptional space, but it and it is an everyday space, is to think about where the practices of another politics is already being done. It's not something that we have to invent or go kind of think about how do we kind of do this right or how do we get the right group of people together.
Ujju Aggarwal:
To go back to your question around the significance of a forgotten place, people are often, again, not in perfect ways, but we in ways that we can learn from, practicing already, systems and and creating knowledge that can be really, necessary, again, to a radical kind of reimagining of rights, of belonging, of of anything we might envision.
Sabina Vaught:
Well, and I think to your point there, anytime something is so vigorously co opted, it's a map that something already exists that needs to be co opted for the power structures not to be decimated by it. I wonder if this sort of, rabid co optation of care into all these different you know, into, market economies, ideology, the sort of hyperindividualization of care, even into the scholarship as sort of cookie making and, you know, love and fun. I mean, cookies are great, but that's not that that's the cooptation. Right? That it's the absorption of something that actually has radical transformative practice, as you said, currently.
Sabina Vaught:
And the there's a fear, so there's a cooptation to, defang it, take the teeth out, make it soft, You know? Make cookies you can eat without teeth, I guess. So so I think there's just such a profound intervention that you're making here. And that and, again, that intervention isn't to say people aren't practicing it, practicing it, but it's an intervention into the literature on schooling and into, the relationship between these economies and these forces and schooling. So I hope people listening will get very excited about the way you're engaging care politically, materially, geographically, and we'll we'll jump in to kind of, grapple with that.
Sabina Vaught:
And to grapple with the way way, I think, until I read your work, I was perhaps aggravated by the coaptation of care, but not particularly insightful about what the the actual, self determined forms of its practice are that were being co opted. So I think your work is just, a just a tremendous intervention there.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Thank you, Sabina. I mean, that's ironic because I feel like I learned a lot from you around how to think about care.
Sabina Vaught:
One of the things you always do so beautifully, whether you're writing or talking, is to engage the thinking of other scholars. But you're never derivative. And by that, I mean, you're not sort of just reproducing what they've said,
Ujju Aggarwal:
but
Sabina Vaught:
really extending, reflecting on, deepening, modifying, complicating. So doing what I think of as the theoretical fun and mandate of our work, which is to to be to be in an in a real conversation conceptually. And I think this is such an important model, particularly for doctoral students. If you're listening, hey. This is a great, great book.
Sabina Vaught:
Please read it. But, especially doctoral students in, you know, what gets called the global north, where there's a lot of pressure to sort of live through the, lit review and the sort of the analysis, it loses the the early scholars' voice. So I'm wondering if you can help people think about what it means to be in careful conversation and through that thinking anew about what we actually observe and what we actually participate in.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. Thank you, Sabina. I mean, again, I learn I think you really helped me along the way center what I was thinking instead of being derivative. So part of it is being, I think, in conversation with good people, which is necessary, I think first and foremost. Apart from being in conversation with you, with others around, what is it?
Ujju Aggarwal:
Right? If we're not writing a book report of sorts, how do we kind of think with I think part of it, I I think, is a sensibility maybe that I gain through organizing as well because you're always learning and in conversation with a larger movement, but your work is very, very particular and grounded. Right? So to imagine that whether it's a historical model or another contemporary model that is somewhere else, you would move and transplant into your own community makes no sense at all, and it would be a failure. But, of course, then what you're working on can't be in isolation from, right, needs to be in dialogue with.
Ujju Aggarwal:
But it's kind of thinking about the bigger questions of, well, what is that work doing in place? How is it doing it? What is it kind of pushing back against? What is it making us learn? Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
Why is it using the method that it's using? How is it thinking about kind of time and place? Right? So I think what's really odd to me sometimes is when people will read something and say, well, that's I don't relate to that. That's not my experience.
Ujju Aggarwal:
You know? Well, that that's, I mean, that's fine. Our our experiences are very particular, but it doesn't really help us kind of think about, again, kind of what is being learned, that and where that knowledge might circulate, how it might help either other organizing or us to think through other problems in practice or praxis, how we actually think together and alongside each other, but not imagining that we're replicating or even trying to reproduce anything.
Sabina Vaught:
Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's so so helpful. I say it a little more plainly with students, but it's like if you walked into a room full of people who'd been, you know, sitting around, maybe having drinks, talking about important ideas for an hour, you wouldn't walk into that room an hour late and say, y'all are wrong. You just don't get it.
Sabina Vaught:
You also would not walk into that room and just repeat back to everyone exactly what they said to you. I mean, both actions would be so odd. And so I think if we can just bring those sensibilities you just described, like, what are the particularities that we're collectively thinking through? How do we listen to each other? How do we bring our own experiences, how do we draw and generalize from larger experiences.
Sabina Vaught:
You know, I think it's almost like this sort of idea of unlearning these sort of strange, almost like impulses to replicate or to refute as first steps. Right? So not my experience or know you've got it wrong or, oh, let me just say what you said and apply it to a new setting. And and those impulses and thrusts are, you know, powerful for doctoral students to kind of contend with.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Absolutely. Right. I think it's really about how we are able to kind of see a situation in front of us differently, in some ways, and what are we need a multiplicity of perspectives to be able to do that. Something that you do so well in your work, which pushes past and unlearning, but also towards a different way of learning. You bring the reader in really to dwell in the space of the intimate.
Ujju Aggarwal:
You bring us really close to the lives of the people you work with, but never in an extractive way. One that's relational, engaging also your own subjectivity, and in many ways also giving the reader a pedagogical lesson on reflexivity. One that I think for a general reader can help us consider our daily lives differently. And for those of us doing ethnographic work also make us approach that work differently. So it's really something, to move from this intimate space that you do, that you hold full of contradiction.
Ujju Aggarwal:
And out of there, build the sharpest theoretical insights and observations. Again, that's not extractive, but in relation. And I remember, you know, often you talking about the importance of bringing people along with you. Right? And this is so something you do really powerfully in, your work.
Ujju Aggarwal:
And I wonder if you can talk about your method here that unsettles really what we're trained to observe, how we're supposed to know things, and maybe what that up closeness you think does.
Sabina Vaught:
This is a well, thank you first. And I think this is such a big and important question. I'm not sure there's one way to answer that or a a best way to start. But one thing I've been thinking about recently is just this idea of research design. And even that framework presumes that we have, like, an architectural knowledge of other people's lives before we relate to one another in real life.
Sabina Vaught:
That presumption or that sort of arrogance that we design something that we then impose, I think, is a question I'm grappling with. And and one of the things that helps me methodologically is to live in the questions and to not seek to arrive at answers because, you know, those of us who sort of work in the dialectic, we're not supposed to reconcile contradictions. So, I think my job is to ask sort of ever more complicated questions, but not to arrive at succinct or comfortable answers. And methodologically, that's really hard because we're talking about the practice of relating with people for many purposes. For me, I think this gets back to what you're saying for a primary purpose of telling multiple stories.
Sabina Vaught:
I think design, moves us away from inquiry and starts with sort of resolution or conclusion that we don't have. And that said, that's challenging because if we project design, we have to then figure out, I think, still a relational practice and process, not just sort of be a free for all because that is itself a design that, has too much space for sort of, as you pointed out, extraction. So that's one way I've been thinking, and I don't know if that gets at part of your question.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. It does so much. Thank you. I really I I'm so excited to hear kind of what you're talking about because, yeah, what you're saying resonates so much, and it feels very rooted pedagogically, what you're saying in terms of your approach. It feels very oriented for me and what I would refer to as a popular education approach to research.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Right? How do we create a space for dialogue and new questions and problem posing rather than this kind of direct move that is very much rooted in finding a solution without kind of, or coming to an answer, as you said. Right? Without necessarily engaging, like you said, living in the dialectic. That's really helpful to me and I think is so important because it's counter to, I think, how most of us learn research methods, but it's definitely within a lot of education studies.
Ujju Aggarwal:
It's very different from how social science education studies, right, is oriented more broadly.
Sabina Vaught:
Yes. I think so. And I think, you know, one of the beautiful things about anthropology or ethnographic work through the discipline is that there's a foot in the humanities as much as or there should be a foot in the humanities as much as a foot in the social sciences. And so that when we think of design, could we think not just of narrative inquiry, but really honestly of what would ethnographic method drawn from the practice and form of the novel look like? What would that mean to think about?
Sabina Vaught:
You know, you talked about the intimacies. Well, I think about in this, most recent book that I wrote with Brian and Jeremiah. Jakes is the sort of protagonist of this book, and he's someone that I met while he was incarcerated in a prison for, state identified boys. There's a passage in there toward the very end where he notices a crack in my tooth. I had this dentist who repaired it cosmetically, so you could see it's not there, which is, you know you know, a little sad because it's in the book, but not on my face.
Sabina Vaught:
But he notices this this, chip or crack in my tooth, and it matches his. And there's no sort of research design that could tell me to sort of look for these types of interactions or then to, make sense of them in particular ways, but it's rather the sort of building of a relationship with him in which I appreciate him as, unknowably full character. So person, if we think of sort of characters in novels. Right? Character in the story, that we're all sort of differently living and all sort of differently trying to tell toward, as you said, an absolutely, transformed world that we're living in these small, mundane, micro interactions that are really as big as any any sort of new universe that we can imagine.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. And you do it so, so beautifully. There's such a profound intersubjectivity, and it makes sense that need to at least have a foot in the humanities or think about narrative inquiry. I think it's one of the many things I learned so much from your work. Because I think a lot of people will say it is from participants that you build theory, etcetera, etcetera, but then you really do do that work of doing it together.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Thank you for what you teach us through that.
Sabina Vaught:
Oh my goodness. Thank you for that. I think part of what we do is just try to be, you know, media for for for other people's stories. You know, it's a balance between the sort of very careful, thorough attention to every element of what we're doing and the letting go and just channeling the people we encounter. And my hope, I guess, particularly in education is we can move toward places where we, as the writer, we're not trying to arrive at neat findings, but we are trying to actually have people leave a book with more questions.
Sabina Vaught:
Okay. So we've been talking around ethnographic methods, and I'm wondering what you had to unlearn or are unlearning or how that happens in the process of doing ethnographic work from soup to nuts, from, you know, the very beginning to writing that final sentence.
Ujju Aggarwal:
I don't know if I can do that, but in hindsight, one of the things I thought I knew was I didn't believe in kind of ethnographic distance. I didn't believe in objectivity. I thought that those things were really messed up and violent, and so I thought it was really good that I was embedded in and close to my, quote, unquote, subject matter. And one of the things I remember Leith Mulling saying to me early on was, you need ethnographic distance. And I was like, oh, no.
Ujju Aggarwal:
But then I was, I quickly learned. I did need to figure out some distance. I had been operating as an organizer with others in a space where we were clearly trained to do certain things, move certain things. We understood who we were. We understood who other quote, unquote others were.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Right? And then we understood who our allies were, and things were often in that formation. And so one of the things that I had to figure out how to do that was really difficult for me was learning to listen to the stories of those who a few years before, just in other instances, we had organized against or petitioned for something. Right? And so I had to kind of develop a curiosity instead of, I don't wanna say assuming to know because we did know things, as as we were organizing, but I had to move into asking different types of questions and wanting to know different things and coming from a different subjective, intersubjective stance.
Ujju Aggarwal:
And that was hard. And I don't know if this was so much of an unlearning, but it was a kind of figuring out how to learn road was I remember feeling right around that time having, like, a little bit of an existential, wait a minute. What am I do you know? Who am I? What am I doing?
Ujju Aggarwal:
Who am I like, what where am I? You know? I remember in that moment reading, Joel Costa Vargas' chapter in engaging contradictions and his flip of the kind of traditional because that was what I was I was like, how do I just observe things in a context that I'm embedded in? You know? And he presents this very brilliant flip.
Ujju Aggarwal:
You know, if we are doing participant observation in a place, then we're already tied to kind of this assumption of neutrality and it's and the connection of neutrality to dominant power. But but if we think about flipping that, right, to, from participant observation to observant participation, we can then, like, have our allegiance, clearly defined to the movements we are part of, and then observe from that place. It also opens up the space of who might be doing the observing, for me. And so broadens that space from the individual to the collective to collective inquiry potentially. But I think for me, it really helped me kind of think about and map not only how to create this distance, but also how to be engaged in the work in a in a way that felt principled.
Sabina Vaught:
I'm so glad you brought up that chapter because he, you know, he talks about realizing he was being scrutinized. And I think about that you know, you talked about self reflexivity. I think that reflexivity around, recognizing being observed, recognizing being scrutinized is so central to doing the kind of ethnographic work we're talking about. He also talks about asserting his political alignments, talking about sort of being politically black. What did that mean?
Sabina Vaught:
What did it mean to clarify that in that set of relations? And it strikes me there and given what you've said and given your book. Also, the the kind of methodological flip highlights the fact that we're always changed. So we if we're not objective, you know, which we can't be objective, you know, we we are being changed by those relations. And in some ways, what I hear you saying is that distance allows for greater change.
Sabina Vaught:
Like, it allows us to have perception across multiple dimensions of people, place, organization, temporality, and ourselves so that we can, experience that that change because we're not static for any I mean, I've been changed by this conversation. So so one of the things I love about that scrutiny, realizing we're being scrutinized, is sort of how that also, shines a a spotlight on how, all those sort of across scale, our interactions change us and that that's ethnographically, not only sort of important, but central to the stories we're telling. But I think also when we can't flip it. So I think about doing ethnographic work in in schools and in prisons and in similar institutions. And, having frequently this experience of telling people who are, you know, aligned with or work for a representative of that institution or that apparatus or the state telling them with in no uncertain terms where my political alignments lie.
Sabina Vaught:
They don't care. They're actually not scrutinizing me. They're just go ahead with the same thing they were saying anyway. So there's sort of a lack of disruption on how that maps power and how distinct that is from, say, Jake's and the way in which he's scrutinizing me to the level of my tooth. So across all possible ways to scrutinize and how important that is for observing how people are as you're describing, making place and making possibility and practice in the moment.
Sabina Vaught:
And so I'm so glad you brought up that chapter.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. No. Thank you for also just what you just said. I mean, the transformation is so key. Right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
It always strikes me when I encounter this iteration of meeting people where they're at, but I was recently at something just, last week where it was again. We have to meet people where they're at so we can tell them how to understand the world. And it's like and then they can come to where I'm at. And I'm like, no. No.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Makes me a little crazy. But it is, like, then where where are we transformed in the process? Right? Like, it needs to be a collective process. I'm so glad you brought up this idea of scrutiny because you really bring that in so beautifully in school prison trust, that kind of back and forth kind of, you know, kind of scrutiny that Jake's is kind of pushing back against you and with you and kind of alongside you.
Ujju Aggarwal:
It's not you know, it's kind of, it's it's, again, in relation. But you bring that in, it seems like very purposefully and, very skillfully, and I think it's, again, a profound learning process for the reader.
Sabina Vaught:
I yes. I think this gets back to this sort of question of unlearning and keeps me on my toes in ways I so appreciate. But I think there's also sort of the humbling moment of the collision of things we know and don't know in the microinteractions of a of a day. So, you know, I remember in compulsory, a different book with the University of Minnesota Press, you know, writing about being grumpy in and it being snowy, and I was tired of my car, and it was junky and all the potholes. And, you know, and then I come in and I'm sitting in the waiting area of this state prison for state identified boys and young men, and I'm irritated with my snow boots.
Sabina Vaught:
The snow is melting, and I have a leak in the boot, and I don't make enough money to buy a new pair, and I'm just grumpy. And then this kid, Ace's mom, comes in, and she's trying to bring him socks and other sort of garments, sort of basic garments. And there's a whole interaction that illustrates the terror inflicted on people through incarceration of young people in families' communities. I could have written just this story of Ace's mom coming in and not being allowed to leave basic garments that a mom wants to give her son. And the story on its own is what's important.
Sabina Vaught:
But the contrast with my sort of you know, I'm people listening who don't know me, I think I'm really grumpy because I keep telling these grumpy stories. But, you know, the contrast with my self absorbed irritations of the day, that contrast isn't about me saying what's important and what's not and, how to understand a system this way and not that way, but to understand that these collisions of massive global systems of repression and power through the small interactions of our daily lives occurring in parallel, just occurring in the same room, little room at the entrance of the prison, reveal something about how power and freedom and all all of our, other conditions of life work. And I and I think that, again, probably comes from being a kid who read every novel I could get my hands on and understanding that we tell stories in simultaneity is important for the richness of revealing power and possibility through just the very small movements of a a daily life. I read a book recently, Fire Exit by Morgan Talty, and I was just, like, it took me out at the knees because it was a story where there was really very little spectacular, and yet the it's just very quotidian, very mundane, and every sentence was just profound in moving my sense of life and the world and relations.
Sabina Vaught:
And so it is that model of sort of being able to juxtapose lived life in ways that that surface, would surface, you know, all the forces around us.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. Thank you. Well, I definitely wanna read that book now, Fire Exit. So thank you, Sabina. I mean, one thing I think kind of building off of what you just shared, I'd love to hear from you about how you see your work in dialogue with education studies.
Ujju Aggarwal:
One of the things your work has done along with that of Damien Sejoyner, Erica Meiners, and others is create a different space for thinking about education. And so I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how you understand, again, your work and dialogue with education studies more generally, what you're seeking to push back on, disrupt, expand, and also maybe what you're relating to.
Sabina Vaught:
First of all, wow. You put me in some pretty good company there, so thank you. You know, I I think educational studies, I have this, such a contentious relationship with it in my mind because I think education means something that well preceded any notion of colonial schooling. Right? The kind of imperial colonial model that we all have sort of inflicted upon us right now in various ways.
Sabina Vaught:
And I think we have yet, me included, to really excavate that framework of education for its it's a capacious word, and we limit it. I think we narrow it to either be kinda coterminous with schooling or to at least be referential to schooling. And I feel my own limitations in that regard and the way I've sort of engaged education that way. And I think, therefore, Ben, even when I am pushing against reformist tendencies and activities in a vast field, Being unintentionally reformist myself. So, you know, what are the questions that I ask?
Sabina Vaught:
Where do I ask them? And how did those actually sometimes often maybe, though I don't wanna admit it, reinscribe schooling as a fact or even as a good? And why I'm not, you know, I'm not afraid of the the critiques. Well, you can't, you know, you can't destroy schooling and this and that. Yeah.
Sabina Vaught:
That's not really what worries me. I think what worries me is this sort of liberal tendency even in people who understand themselves as far beyond, you know, far left of liberal and, you know, I think liberalism is, like, a great danger to us. And then I do these things that I think many of us well, I'll just talk about myself. But I think that this is maybe the the place where ed studies or educational studies needs to, yeah, be scrutinized and upended is in that, where it's accidentally reformist. Because we can all point out where people are intentionally reformist, but when we're unintentionally reformist by reifying or re enshrining certain truths that aren't true, that actually aren't observing.
Sabina Vaught:
This is why I love partition because I love the drawing from diverse global histories. It's like a social studies textbook. But to actually think, to actually think about what we're seeing instead of to think about some things within a structure we don't scrutinize to the fullest capacity of scrutiny.
Ujju Aggarwal:
That's so right. That's so helpful to think about how we've limited ourselves. And I wonder in dialogue with that, again, I do find that your work has opened up this other space, and I also hear you that, like, we're also entrapped. Right? How do we kind of make sure we don't get comfortable in this entrapment in a way, that is about, like, asking in a certain set of questions that doesn't really push, us further?
Ujju Aggarwal:
When I was in graduate school, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of studying. I was both kind of engaged by anthropology. I was uncomfortable with it, so I would get up every day when I was doing my field work, and I was just like, do not become that like, don't be that ethnographer. And I think kind of what you're saying is, like, don't become entrapped and comfortable in this entrapped, you know, kind of, space of ask, how do we kind of push ourselves, and have that kind of self reflexivity as well as collective accountability, and, push ourselves. And I wonder in some ways how the current geopolitical moment of genocide that we're seeing in Palestine and elsewhere, schools and hospitals are the two main targets, right?
Ujju Aggarwal:
What does that mean? How does it push us to think? It's pushed me to consider, how do we think about this in this moment? How do we consider not just how we're embedded in the imperial core in relation to genocide and the destruction of schools and hospitals and scholasticide, but also then how does it kind of shift or lift a particular liberal veil of what we imagine schooling or education or life to be, right? Or again, the limits of restorative justice, right, as a project of the state, as another kind of political trap.
Ujju Aggarwal:
But here in New York, it was enacted as a form of retaliation against teachers who did speak out against genocide in their schools. They had to, as a form of showing that they were sorry in some ways, participate in a restorative justice circle at their school. One thing that we've talked about, but also I think is possible in this moment is, you know, we might be shifting out of those, those entrapments in a way or have a possibility to shift out of them that we might not have had in another moment.
Sabina Vaught:
Well, in in alignment with your work that it's being mapped. Right? I think these complex relationships across scale are all of a sudden being mapped, and they're they're like three d maps. Right? You're all of a sudden, able to understand the territory in new ways so that genocide and I think people making connections across genocides and across time too is remapping then the honesty of schooling's project.
Sabina Vaught:
So, you know, schools, k through higher ed, are becoming very honest about their aims and purposes. I'm not saying they're saying it honestly. They're acting more honestly about their aims and projects. They're acting honestly about their alliances and their investments, and not just monetarily, but their investments in war and their relationship to nation state war machines and what that means for staying in our lanes. Like, what what is your expertise?
Sabina Vaught:
Oh, well, why would you talk about Palestine? You're a scholar of x. And so the way in which even being a scholar or engaging an inquiry is being more honestly policed. Right? It's scary.
Sabina Vaught:
Honesty is not a good thing here. I'll just be clear. It's just that we're encountering more authentic behavior from the university. And that's scary, and it's connected to sort of all the forces of terror, but it's also giving us a very clear map to study, to understand how we might move and how we want to move, I think, collectively to your point. You know, what is it that we do want to protect and not protect and create and recreate and and all of those new questions that we have to ask in the face of terror.
Sabina Vaught:
And the questions people are asking that are, you know, connecting state execution with the war machine, with multiple genocides now and historically, and being able to build sort of that constellation. So the stars have been kinda all over the map, and now people are creating that constellation to understand. And it's not that that some people haven't had deep understanding. Of course, I I certainly don't wanna suggest that. I think there's a more more momentum for a larger group of people to be able to observe and understand the interrelatedness of and to believe people who have been sort of offering analysis and the insight all along.
Ujju Aggarwal:
No. I think that's right. And I I know you're saying, how do we make sure we're not falling into this reformist path when we first started talking about thinking about education studies, your work in relation, kind of what you're pushing back against the space you've created for others. And I think one of the things, again, that you and others did create a space for other many of us to kind of enter into was a space of thinking critically about a broader set of questions, politics, life, and relation. So that we were never ever just talking about schools, but actually calling into question, what is the political project of schooling?
Ujju Aggarwal:
How do we disrupt this idea of a pipeline? How do we think about different forms of entanglements and the limits or the embeddedness of political projects within one another, right, and their connection and relation? And I think connected to what you're saying then, this moment also asks us to think about a different set of relations, right, and embeddedness, and connection, and then expand from there. So I think it it is a moment that feels very deeply connected to, again, some of the space that you've created with others in education studies, pushing back against it, working alongside it within it, expanding its kind of space, the space and mode there through which we might even conceive of or talk about education as a political project with a lot of different, again, kind of tentacles that are embedded and sometimes, again, contradictory. And as you said, kind of living in the dialectic, how do we hold that space?
Ujju Aggarwal:
And then I think it's this question about, yeah, how do we hold that space across time, across genocides in place here and think about, like, clearly right now, I think, as you said, some things that are being made clear is that liberalism not only does not protect you, it wants to kill you. Right? Or you didn't say that, but I think it's one of the thing. Like Yeah.
Sabina Vaught:
I agree. Yes.
Ujju Aggarwal:
And so, yeah, how does this moment kind of create an offering for what we might expand ever expand, and create more space for collective inquiry around and collective work, not just inquiry, but kind of political work and praxis about what it is, like the life making parts of education and where that might live.
Sabina Vaught:
And I'm curious, where are your questions right now? So you have this extraordinary book. Talk about making space in educational studies. I mean, it just pushes every boundary and assumption. And I know that when you move away from a project and and then here it is in print, then you have these questions drawn directly from it that finishing somehow, I think, makes us deepen those questions.
Sabina Vaught:
And I wonder what the questions are you're sort of sitting in and the tensions that you're living in.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. One of the things that I've been interested in thinking about is what the epistemology is that is born from the space of enclosure and what we have to learn from that, both about how it's enacted relationally, but also how it recognizes enclosure and how it imagines life beyond it and how that vision is kind of central to what we might fight for. And I think I'm also interested in pushing back against what I think is a useful political concept or framework on the ground, but has become a little formulaic for how we see the world. And that is the framework of reformist versus non reformist reform. So I'm interested again thinking about if we center the epistemology and the space of what is imagined there.
Ujju Aggarwal:
How does that direct us to maybe a different set of questions than, again, answers? Because I think one of the things that I feel a little worried about sometimes is how I see people, not always, again, it's a very useful political framework for political struggle. Sometimes I worry about what gets dismissed and who gets dismissed by how this framework then gets enacted as a formula to create further categories very quickly.
Sabina Vaught:
So that there's almost a rubric for what is legitimate knowledge, what's in legitimate organizing, and it becomes a new regime.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah.
Sabina Vaught:
Right? A new policing regime. Exactly. Yeah.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Exactly. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ujju Aggarwal:
And it is it's very rigid, and I think it's kind of politically dangerous. You know? Even though it's coming from, like, a so called non liberal orientation, it is enacting, like you're saying, that's really helpful to think about it like that.
Sabina Vaught:
Well and I think that stance loses sight of our number one thing we have to do in any kind of political work, and that is identify common cause. And if we privilege a rubric of legitimate radical action over an alliance through common cause, we can't learn from each other. Right? We can't arrive at change because then we've drawn battle lines through common cause. It's not possible to to get there.
Sabina Vaught:
So I I do think you're pointing to this, which I mean, this is throughout the book. Right? That common cause is this relational glue. It's the relational juncture. It's the thing that moves us through all sorts of other fissures and fractures.
Sabina Vaught:
So it's striking to me, and I I I'm excited to hear where you go with that set of questions.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Thank you, Sabina, and thank you so much for this conversation. I'm excited to continue to be in conversation with you.
Sabina Vaught:
As am I. And thank you so much. I I enjoyed this very much.
Ujju Aggarwal:
Yeah. Me too. I feel like I learned a lot. Thank you.
Sabina Vaught:
Me too. Thanks.
Ujju Aggarwal:
This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education by Odu Odu Ajarwal is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.