Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula.

It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices.

Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.

Kalervo N. Gulson is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. Relevant work has examined the connections between space and race when theorizing education policy change.

P. Taylor Webb is Associate Professor in the Department of Education, University of British Columbia. His work examines education policy in relation to ideas of neoliberalism, governmentality, and bio- and micro-politics.