Unbundling the Teacher: Race, Hypervisibility, and Affective Labour in New Orleans Charter Schools

Professor Christien Tompkins
Rutgers University

After Hurricane Maria, the Post-Katrina privatization of New Orleans schools has been cited as both a model and warning for the island, linking to longer histories of the Caribbean as an experimental site for models of economic development. Drawing on research among New Orleans education reformers, this talk interrogates precisely how Post-Katrina schools become a template for reconstruction. Rather than merely account for the ways that techniques of education reform in New Orleans might be transported to Puerto Rico, the talk will underscore the precise ways that reconstruction is modeled as an ideological object and the work that these models do to transform political temporalities and possibilities.