Who controls the infrastructure of social reproduction? Finance, reproduction, and resistance in educational landscapes

Abstract

This commentary explores the dynamics of financialization in relation to educational infrastructures of social reproduction, an area McFadden identifies as a ‘generative avenue’ for future research. This exploration is accomplished through a discussion of how financialization is currently reshaping schooling in the US context in two ways: (a) through troubling the longstanding reproduction/resistance dialectic in education; and (b) through reorienting the built infrastructures of schooling into private revenue streams for investors. In doing so I argue that studying new modes of financial accumulation which directly touch upon the practices and infrastructures of schooling is critical to understanding the contemporary infrastructures of urban social reproduction that McFadden identifies.