Infrastructures of social reproduction: Schools, everyday urban life, and the built environment of education

Abstract

Drawing together the literature on social reproduction and infrastructure, this paper demonstrates how understanding education as an infrastructure of social reproduction enables scholars to evaluate the ways in which changing education landscapes affect other aspects of urban life for residents. Building from the empirical context of Chicago's schools, this paper demonstrates how racism characterizes the dispossession of social reproductive infrastructures and attendant transformations of urban life. In doing so, this article argues that theorizing education as an infrastructure of social reproduction allows for a more robust theorization of the relationship between social reproduction and the built environment as well as the everyday temporality of social reproduction. Theorizing education landscapes in this way facilitates sharper thinking around a contradiction at the heart of social reproduction theory: that social reproductive sites are increasingly key spaces of capital accumulation while simultaneously serving as important terrains to fight that process. This framework allows for close attention to how the frictions between the social reproductive needs of capital and the social reproductive needs of communities play out within urban infrastructures in Chicago.