Market Movements and the Dispossessed: Race, Identity, and Subaltern Agency among Black Women Voucher Advocates

Market Movements and the Dispossessed:Race, Identity, and Subaltern Agencyamong Black Women Voucher Advocates

Thomas C. Pedroni

Critical educational researchers in the United States and elsewhere are missing some-

thing essential in their inattention to considerable support among Black urban women for

market-based educational reforms, including vouchers. While the educational left has

engaged in important empirical and theoretical work demonstrating the particularly neg-

ative impact of educational marketization on the disenfranchised, not enough attention

has been paid to the crucial role the educationally dispossessed have actually played in

building these otherwise conservative reforms. Engaging with Michael Apple�s arguments

concerning processes of identity formation within conservative movement-making, we

can begin to conceptualize the importance of subaltern groups in market-based educa-

tional reforms. Yet ethnographic work conducted with Black voucher mothers, school

officials, and community leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, shows that this subaltern

process of conservative formation does not always occur in the manner theorized by

Apple and his colleague Anita Oliver, in which ideologically relatively unformed parents

and families are ‘‘pushed’’ to the Right by an intransigent state. Although the conceptual

tools they provide are the foundation of our ability to imagine a more compelling theori-

zation of dynamics and social actors in Milwaukee, significant conceptual—not to mention

empirical—work remains to be done. In this essay I renovate Apple and Oliver�s argu-

ments concerning conservative modernization in order to make them more resonant with

the processes of race, gender, subaltern identity formation and agency evident in my

ethnographic field research with low-income African-American women choosing vouchers

Thomas C. Pedroni is an assistant professor of secondary social studies methods, educa-

tional foundations, curriculum theory, and qualitative research methodology at Utah State

University. His recent research has centered on issues of identity formation and subaltern

agency among urban low-income predominantly African-American and Latino parents within

otherwise largely conservative coalitions for publicly financed private school vouchers. His

research interests also include the development of composite critical and post-structural ap-

proaches in educational theory and research, the identification of persistent exclusionary power/

knowledge regimes in state-level educational reforms, and the analysis of the increasing colo-

nization of the global educational sphere by neo-liberal and managerial forms. Address cor-

respondence to Thomas C. Pedroni, Department of Secondary Education, Utah State

University, 2815 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT, 84322-2815, USA; e-mail: thomas.pedroni

@usu.edu.

The Urban Review, Vol. 37, No. 2, June 2005 (� 2005)

DOI: 10.1007/s11256-005-0005-3

Published Online: July 2, 2005

83

0042-0972/05/0600-0083/0 � 2005 Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, Inc.

for their families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Aided by critical, feminist, and post-structural

theorists both within and outside educational disciplines I assess the utility and limitations

of Apple and Oliver�s framework in explaining the mobilization around ‘parental choice�and vouchers in Milwaukee. Based on my conceptual and empirical findings, I retheorize

pro-voucher African-American politicians, community leaders, and poor and working class

women (and their families) as representative of a subaltern ‘third force� in conservative

formation. Their tactical investments in fleeting conservative alliances and subject posi-

tions, I argue, are likely to play an increasingly significant role in educational and social

reform both in the United States and elsewhere.

KEY WORDS: race; gender; vouchers; identity.

If you�re drowning and a hand is extended to you, you don�t ask if the hand isattached to a Democrat or a Republican. . . From the African American posi-tion—at the bottom, looking up—there�s not much difference between theDemocrats and the Republicans anyway. Whoever is sincere about working

with us, our door is open.

–(Wisconsin State Representative Polly Williams, the ‘‘mother of school choice’’in Milwaukee, quoted in Carl, 1995, p. 259)

Public school has a lot of changes that I felt that needed to be made. I�m notknocking public schools. Public school has a lot of good things to offer. Butpublic school also on the other hand has a lot of improving to do. And I re-

sented that being African-American—and of course I live in one of the poorerneighborhoods—my children were stigmatized by that. And they felt like theywere giving you something. I�m a working mother. I pay taxes. It�s like nobodyelse�s. . . And my taxes help pay for public education. So as far as I was con-

cerned, it was a paid education. You know, and I didn�t appreciate the stigmalike you have to take whatever I give you, you know. It�s free. You ain�t pay-ing for nothing. And you know, that was the stigma. And it was so hard to get

anything done. I was always. . . It was always a fight. And I was looking insearch of something different.

–(Sonia Israel, mother whose two daughters attended an Islamic voucher

school, cited in Pedroni, 2004, p. 156)

Black women�s work remains a fundamental location where the dialectical rela-tionship of oppression and activism occurs

–(Patricia Hill Collins, 1990, p. 45–46)

In a ground-breaking essay in Cultural Politics and Education entitled‘‘Becoming Right,’’ critical educational theorists and researchers MichaelApple and Anita Oliver examine a textbook controversy in a semi-ruralwestern community in order to prise open the complex and sometimes

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contradictory ways in which Rightist educational movements are actuallyformed at the level of the local and the everyday (Apple, 1996; Apple et al.,2003). What they find significantly disrupts previous analyses of how theeducational Right grows, which ‘‘too often assume a unitary ideologicalmovement, seeing it as a relatively uncontradictory group rather than acomplex assemblage of different tendencies many of which are in a tense andunstable relationship to each other’’ (Apple, 1996, pp. 44–45). For Appleand Oliver, the Right is not simply an already-existing ‘‘massive structuringforce that is able to work its way into daily life and into our discourses inwell-planned ways’’ (Apple, 1996, p. 44). In this paper, I intend to adopt theprovocative theoretical framework with which Apple and Oliver present usin order to assess its utility and its limitations as a theory of political for-mation in analyzing the continuing mobilization around ‘parental choice�and vouchers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. As I engage in thistask, I will be particularly interested in questioning conceptual binariesembedded in Apple�s theorization which do not adequately account forsignificant race, class, and gender dynamics in the Milwaukee struggle. I willthen seek to retheorize the pro-voucher coalition of African-Americanpolitical representatives, community leaders, and mostly poor and workingclass women (and their families) as representative of a ‘third force� in con-servative formation, and will assess the pivotal role played by such groups inconditional alliances enabling the success of Rightist projects in educationand elsewhere. Finally, mobilizing the concept of identity formation in ananalysis of interviews with two Black women voucher supporters, I willargue that the conditional alliances formed in such mobilizations are muchmore fleeting and ephemeral than Apple�s concept of ‘‘hegemonic alliance,’’standing in isolation, might suggest, leaving the door open for rearticulatingmarginalized families� educational concerns to ultimately more effective,meaningful, and democratic education reform. My first task, then, will be toexplicate the way in which the formation of conservative movements istheorized in Apple�s work.

POLITICAL, STATE, AND SUBJECT FORMATION IN APPLES

THEORY OF CONSERVATIVE MODERNIZATION

Michael Apple identifies four dominant groups, which together constitutea hegemonic alliance within the social order of the United States: neolib-erals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populists, and a fraction of the newmiddle class (Apple, 1996, p. 7). Taken together, these groups are hegemonicin that they are able to sustain leadership and move forward a particularagenda largely through winning consent to their social vision. The elementsof the hegemonic alliance accomplish this in two ways—by compromising

RACE, IDENTITY, AND SUBALTERN AGENCY 85

with each other on what the elements of that vision are to be, and by(re)shaping the terrain of common sense within the larger culture so that itincreasingly, although never totally, resonates with their cultural messagesand interpretations (Apple, 1996, p. 15).

Because it is formed and sutured through compromise, the social visionof the hegemonic alliance is never unitary—rather, it exists always in asomewhat fragile tension, fraught with contradictions that constantlythreaten to undo its continued success (Apple, 1996, p. 15). To take just onevivid example, while social conservatives have traditionally argued for agendered separation between the so-called public and private spheres (atleast for some economically advantaged white women), free market con-servatives recognize the ways in which economic elites have profited fromthe wage-depressing and labor-cost saving effects of the continued entranceof women into the workplace (naturally many working-class women andother women of color were already there, which speaks to the ways in whichthe gendered vision of social conservatives has simultaneously also beenraced and classed in deeply troubling ways.) The willingness to suturecompromises over positions such as ‘the proper use of women� (therebyyielding the ‘neo� in ‘neoconservative�) is precisely what has enabled thesuccess of conservative modernization.

As the Rightist alliance sutures over its internal contradictions and in-fuses the everyday discourses of American public life with its sense-makingconstructions, it also, at least potentially, grows. In other words, for Apple,the hegemonic bloc can be seen as dynamic (that is, always in formation) inthree important ways. First, it is dynamic temporally, in that it can and mustrespond to changing historical conditions, shifting alliances, the introduc-tion of new technologies, the birth of new social movements, larger eco-nomic trends, and so on. Secondly and thirdly, this ‘conservativemodernization� is dynamic spatially, discursively speaking, in both a hori-zontal and vertical fashion. Horizontal dynamism is present in the suturingthat takes place as different dominant groups gather together in tense unityunder a single ‘ideological umbrella� (Apple, 1996, p. 15); vertical dynamismis present as the discourses of these dominant groups ‘‘act in creative waysto disarticulate prior connections and rearticulate groups of [largely ideo-logically unformed] people into this larger ideological movement by con-necting to the real hopes, fears, and conditions of people�s daily lives and byproviding seemingly ‘sensible� explanations for the current troubles peopleare having’’ (Apple, 1996, p. 45).

This politically formative process of disarticulation and rearticulationdoes not, however, occur in a seamless manner directly governed by thedominant groups� political will. Instead, as Apple and Oliver brilliantlydemonstrate in their study of conservative formation in the textbook

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controversy mentioned in my introduction, ‘ordinary people� typically be-come articulated to larger conservative social movements through a complexseries of ‘‘accidents’’ and interactions with the state (Apple, 1996, p. 45). ForApple and Oliver, it is not just the hegemonic alliance and the subjectivitiesof those who might be articulated into it that are always in formation—thestate, too, is dynamic in an analogous manner; the state ‘grows� in responseto its interactions with assemblages of social movements which constantlyseek to reshape it to their vision. Although the state grows through a varietyof potential responses, including through adapting, mediating, and/orresisting the demands of social movements, parents in the ‘Citrus Valley�textbook controversy mainly encountered a defensively postured stateseeking to insulate itself from further challenges by Right-wing ‘‘censors.’’The state as enshrined in the bureaucratic offices of the local school districtresponded to the concerns of ideologically relatively unformed and heter-ogeneous groups of parents by making available to them only two subjectpositions through which they might be seen, heard, and understood: that ofthe responsible parent who supported the ‘‘professional decision-making’’ ofschool district officials regarding textbook selection, and that of the irre-sponsible right-wing censor. Forced into the latter subject position as aresult of their unmet and persistent concerns, many politically unformedparents became quite ideologically formed as they turned to Right-wingnational organizations for help in overcoming the intransigence of thebureaucratic state. In the process of this ‘‘accidental’’ and highly mediatedsubject formation, the Right grew (Apple, 1996, p. 64).

WITH WHAT POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS DOES APPLES

MODEL PRESENT US? THE BATTLE OVER ‘PARENTAL CHOICE’

IN MILWAUKEE

In their study of conservative formation in the Citrus Valley textbookcontroversy, Apple and Oliver have clearly disrupted received and unhelpfulnotions of a unitary Right growing seamlessly, in isolation, and throughstrict intentionality. In many ways reminiscent of Apple�s earlier interven-tions concerning reproduction in schools (Apple, 1982), the researchers haveprovided us with a very rich account of the complex, mediated, and con-tradictory ways in which the hegemonic alliance actually grows througharticulations with the real hopes, fears, and good sense of ordinary peoplerebuked by the state.

In what follows I intend to explore the ways in which this approach toconservative formation both enables and limits our understanding of an-other moment in which conservative modernization has significantly alteredpublic policy. After identifying some of the possible limitations of Apple�s


framework, my hope is that I will be able to both analyze the roots of theselimitations and propose alternatives.

The 1990 Milwaukee Parental Choice [publicly funded voucher] Pro-gram (MPCP), at the time of its inception, represented one of the mostimportant interventions by elements of conservative modernization intheir larger drive to destabilize public schooling ‘as we know it� as a keyelement of the [relatively anemic] American social democratic accord.Through a complex amalgamation of forces and actors, Milwaukee be-came a center stage on which larger ideological battles over the character,form, and funding of education in the United States and elsewhere wereto be fought.

Jim Carl, in an article entitled ‘‘Unusual Allies: Elite and Grass-rootsOrigins of Parental Choice in Milwaukee,’’ adopts a theoretical frameworkfor understanding the development of events in Milwaukee that in manyways resonates with Apple�s own construction. However, as we shall see,some elements of the history that Carl narrates seem to fit less comfortablywithin such a theorization, although the degree to which Carl is aware of theincommensurability is unclear (Carl, 1996, pp. 266–285).

Carl begins his analysis of factors leading to the rise of the ‘parentalchoice� debate in Milwaukee by describing the emergence nationally of ahegemonic alliance in the early 1980s, which he calls the conservative res-toration (following Apple). Within this alliance, in relation to issues of‘parental choice,� Carl depicts the tensely intersecting agendas of two of thedominant groups also delimited by Apple—neoliberals and neoconserva-tives. According to Carl, local neoliberal education reformers, on the onehand, believed that the extension of private markets into the state�s educa-tion systems would bring improvement in educational attainment as well asprofitability. On the other hand, local neoconservative educationalreformers privileged private schools for their supposed traditional academiccurriculum, religious training, and strict discipline (Carl, 1996, p. 268). Al-though Apple is much less cursory in describing the complexity of thesepositions and interactions (Apple, 1996, pp. 27–31), the parallels are quiteclear and, as will be shown below, useful for understanding certain dynamicswithin the Milwaukee context.

However, Carl also acknowledges that ‘‘not all proponents of vouchers inMilwaukee can be described as agents of the conservative restoration’’ (Carl,1996, p. 268). Rather, Carl outlines a ‘‘conditional alliance’’ between state-level neoliberal reformers and Milwaukee-based supporters of a handful ofindependent community schools (Carl, 1996, p. 268). According to Carl,

Five factors generated this conditional alliance: dissatisfaction among manyblack Milwaukeeans with a school system that failed to deliver acceptable

88 THE URBAN REVIEW

educational outcomes for disproportionately high numbers of black students;the existence of community schools whose multicultural supporters had sought

public funding for two decades; the growth of black political representation inMilwaukee during an era when government policies tilted rightward, as person-ified by state representative Polly Williams; the efforts of Governor TommyThompson�s administration to craft neoliberal and neoconservative social pol-

icy; and the rise of Milwaukee�s Bradley Foundation as the nation�s premierconservative grantmaker (p. 268).

In analyzing the ‘‘conditional alliance’’ which Carl describes, Apple�s modelseems to offer two possible inroads for making sense of the African-American supporters of independent community schools led by Polly Wil-liams. The first possibility, one which Apple would clearly not endorse inthis instance, is that we see the Milwaukee-based voucher supporters underthe leadership of Polly Williams as becoming part of the alliance of domi-nant groups within this context. In such scenario, we would read PollyWilliams� faction as having horizontally sutured itself together, throughcompromises, with neoliberals and neoconservatives, thereby sharing in the[always partial] exercise of hegemonic control over the education debates inMilwaukee. The second possibility, again experimenting with Apple�sframework, is that we see Polly Williams� group as vertically articulated toRight-wing movements in the manner of the ‘‘ordinary people’’ of theConcerned Citizens of Citrus Valley.

Although these seem to be the two theoretical spaces conceptuallyavailable in Apple�s theorization for interpreting the conditional alliance inMilwaukee, in what follows I will show the inadequacy of both. In fairness,Apple does mention that ‘‘rightist policies are often compromises both be-tween the Right and other groups and among the various tendencies withinthe conservative alliance’’ (my emphasis, Apple, 1996, p. 45). However, ifthe compromises ‘‘between the Right and other groups’’ are to be under-stood as a conceptual category outside of the two possibilities I havementioned, Apple doesn�t seem to adequately describe or theorize thispossibility. Assuming that I have described the two possibilities, as they existin Apple�s work correctly, I now turn to analyzing the ways in which eachscenario partially explains and partially misconstrues the reality of theconditional alliance in Milwaukee.

However, before I proceed with this task, I want to introduce a set ofbinaries which I believe underlie Apple�s conception of the Right and theprocess of conservative formation (see Table 1), and which I will laterproblematize in hopes of opening up a ‘third theoretical space� fordescribing the conditional alliance in Milwaukee, as well as conditionalalliances in other settings.


At least temporarily and within the Milwaukee context, despite ourcontrary intuitions, Polly Williams� faction embodies characteristics whichseem to locate it within Apple�s framework as a member of the dominantalliance. For example, Williams� explicit recognition of the limitations ofhistorical alliances with white liberals clearly indicates carefully formed andsophisticated tactical ideology in response to political experience (Carl,1996, p. 274). Her realism and lack of naivete regarding both the politicalclimate of the late 1980s and the self-interestedness of neoliberals willing toally with her is further indication of this; it is also indicative of the suturingnature of her relationship with neoliberals, in which neoliberal languageconcerning competition and markets became fused with her own vision ofcommunity control (or what Fraser (1989) would call a ‘‘politics of recog-nition’’). As Carl notes, ‘‘Unlike her New Right allies, who argued that thesocial safety net ought to be lowered or dismantled, Williams believed thatblacks needed to take control of publicly funded programs and institutionsthat targeted their communities’’ (Carl, 1996, p. 274). In short, Williams�vision is not being subsumed into that of the Right, as in the case of theCitrus Valley parents; neither she nor her faction ‘becomes Right� in anyway that would preserve the normal stability of that terminology.

While Williams� faction resonates with certain characteristics of mem-bership within an alliance of dominant groups as described by Apple (and asdepicted in the column labeled ‘‘Scenario One’’ in Table 1), it falls far shortin other respects. It is very difficult to conceive of Williams� faction and itspoor and working class Latino and African-American supporters, mostlywomen, as a dominant group within the political landscape of Milwaukee.The most cursory examination of social and material conditions that framethe everyday lives of low-income African-American and Latino women andtheir families in Milwaukee immediately renders this a conceptual impos-sibility, as does the long and frustrating experience African-Americanleaders, including Williams, have had in failing to gain greater responsive-ness from the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) bureaucracy.

These latterqualities, then, seem topoint us awayconceptually from locatingAfrican-American supporters of vouchers inMilwaukee as ‘‘part of the allianceofdominantgroups’’ (ScenarioOne), and toward the secondScenario, resonantwith the experiences of the ‘‘ordinary, ideologically unformed’’ parents of theCCCV in the ‘Becoming Right� piece. For example, immediately we are struckby a parallel between the CCCV�s encounter with an unresponsive statebureaucracy andWilliams� faction�s own experiences seeking redresswithMPS.Williams� faction, clearly, was ‘‘pushed toward Rightist social movements’’because of the intransigence of state actors (for example, see Holt, 2000).Furthermore, within this struggle, it is easy for most critical educationalresearchers to identify the ‘‘real hopes and fears’’ of Williams� faction with

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which we should be highly sympathetic. Finally, as mentioned previously, theWilliams� faction in the conditional alliance rests much more comfortably,relative to power, on the side of the ‘‘not-yet-dominant.’’

Nevertheless, as alluded to earlier, aspects of the Williams� faction arequite incongruous with the ‘‘ordinary people’’ formulation of Scenario Two.To argue that her group remained ideologically unformed or characterizedin its ideas by common sense understandings would be to deeply insult thedecades of struggle around education in which groups of African-Americansin Milwaukee (and elsewhere) have engaged (Holt, 2000). Furthermore, therelationship of Williams� faction to the neoliberal groups with which sheworked was not simply vertical; again, the sophisticated manner in whichWilliams was able to negotiate her interests with those of neoliberals dem-onstrated a significant degree of ‘‘horizontal’’ relationship between the two.

If the conditional alliance described by Carl does not fit conceptually intothe two available scenarios, how then should it be theorized? And if this

TABLE 1.

The Two Scenarios of Conservative Formation, as Theorized by Apple

Category

Scenario One: ‘Partof the Alliance of

Dominant Groups�

Scenario Two: ‘OrdinaryPeople� who ‘Become

Right�

Relationship to power Horizontal VerticalConnection to powerthrough

Suturing compromises Articulation of elementsof ‘‘good sense’’ to

conservative projectQuality of ideology Formed UnformedNature of ideas Ideology Common sense

Relative power Dominant Not-yet-dominantCharacter of ideas Elements of good sense

which, in the absence

of a more authoritativeprogressive vision,appeal to ordinary people

Real hopes and fears towhich progressives are

sympathetic

Relative spatial metaphor Above Below

Relationship to state Attempt (and frequentlysucceed) in affecting thedirection of the state

through interventions byassemblages of socialmovements

Pushed toward Rightistsocial movements ifrebuked by an

unresponsive state

Example Neoliberals,Neoconservatives

The concerned citizensof citrus valley (CCCV)


practical example and its theorization apply in other settings, what are theshifting implications for our understanding of the Right�s success in thepresent moment (see Arnot, David, & Weiner, 1999; Ball, 1994; Clarke &Newman, 1997)?

TOWARD A RETHEORIZATION OF ‘CONDITIONAL ALLIANCES’ AND

A ‘THIRD SPACE’ IN CONSERVATIVE FORMATION

In the battle over school choice in Milwaukee, as I have shown, Williamsand her working class and poor African-American supporters cannot prop-erly be theorized as either a dominant group sutured within a hegemonicalliance, or as a group of ideologically relatively unformed, ordinary peoplearticulated into the Right as a result of the state�s unresponsiveness. Despiteits theoretical elusiveness,Williams� faction was absolutely central both to theemergence of ‘parental choice� programs in Milwaukee, and to the claims torespectability and legitimacy that voucher programs have since gained innational and even global educational debates. Given this, the theorization ofa ‘third space� for movements such as the one comprised of working class andpoor, mostly female, African-American voucher supporters in Milwaukee, iscrucial to the project of understanding the Right�s continued success in dis-mantling key vestiges of the American social democratic accord.1

As the Milwaukee ‘parental choice� case demonstrates, the hegemonicalliance was not able to impose voucher programs in Milwaukee or else-where until the birth of a more fleeting conditional alliance, in which it wasnevertheless the major, and exponentially more powerful, player. AlthoughCarl does not ‘unpack� his use of the term conditional alliance as much as wemight hope, his usage, especially in relation to the Milwaukee example,seems to imply an alliance that is much more fleeting and ephemeral than astand-alone hegemonic alliance restored over 30 years (as in Apple, 1996),successfully suturing new compromises among its dominant members whilearticulating ideologically relatively unformed, ordinary people into its ranks.

In theorizing the qualities of the non-dominant but ideologically formedgroups that join with dominant ones in order to form successful conditionalalliances, a useful approach might be to envision the two sides of the table ofqualities I constructed as horizons, with the parent activists of the CCCVlargely encapsulated within the descriptors in the right-hand column, that ofScenario Two in Table 1, above. Dominant groups, such as neoliberal andneoconservative forces, on the other hand, would largely align with thecharacteristics in the left-hand column, that of Scenario One. Different‘third space� groups with which the Right formed conditional alliances, then,would potentially occupy positions on either the left, center, or right sides ofthese eight categorical horizons. For example, the Polly Williams� faction of

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African-American voucher families in Milwaukee would fall along thesehorizons at times more on the side of column one, and at times more on theside of column two, in accordance with the sketch I presented earlier, and asshown in Table 2 below.

That is, as I have shown, in certain distinct ways given the long history ofstruggle for access to quality education and educational self-determinationfor the African-American community in Milwaukee, this faction is relatively‘‘formed,’’ ‘‘ideological,’’ and ‘‘suturing’’ in a ‘‘horizontal’’ manner withdominant groups (all descriptors in the left-hand column). At the same timeit remains largely ‘‘not-yet-dominant,’’ ‘‘pushed toward Rightist socialmovements by an unresponsive state,’’ and constituted by ‘‘real hopes andfears to which progressives can be sympathetic,’’ as encapsulated within theright-hand column.

However, just as we need to realize the heterogeneous qualities ofgroups that are sutured/articulated to the hegemonic alliance in fleeting

TABLE 2.

One Possible Approximation of ‘Third Space� Groups in Conservative Formation, as

in the Example of African-American Pro-Voucher Community Leaders, Parents, and

Guardians Theorized within this Article. The Prospective Positions are Indicated in

Bold Font

Category

Scenario One: ‘Partof the Alliance of

Dominant Groups�

Scenario Two: ‘OrdinaryPeople� who ‘Become

Right�

Relationship to power Horizontal VerticalConnection to powerthrough

Suturing compromises Articulation of elementsof ‘‘good sense’’ to

conservative projectQuality of ideology Formed UnformedNature of ideas Ideology Common sense

Relative power Dominant Not-yet-dominant

Character of ideas Elements of good sensewhich, in the absence ofa more authoritative

progressive vision, appealto ordinary people

Real hopes and fears to

which progressives are

sympathetic

Relative spatial metaphor Above Below

Relationship to state Attempt (and frequentlysucceed) in affecting thedirection of the state

through interventionsby assemblages ofsocial movements

Pushed toward Rightist

social movements if

rebuked by an

unresponsive state


and temporary conditional alliances, we also need to think clearly aboutthe quality of the conservative victories implicit in such alliances. Whereasthe first two scenarios of the Right�s growth—through horizontal suturingand vertical articulations—represent fairly monolithic victories for thelarger project of the Right, the third scenario involving conditional alli-ances opens up the possibility of a more nuanced, ambiguous, and con-tradictory sense of victory. For example, in analyzing the growth of thecharter school movement in the United States, we could point to thelegitimating role that ‘third space� groups such as pro-charter progressiveeducators play in legislating the Right�s victory. However, this victory bythe Right cannot be seen as a monolithic victory, for it also represents apartial but ‘real� victory for progressive educators who are enabledthrough charter laws to form schools more closely aligned with a radicallydemocratic educational and social vision. More will be said about this inrelation to African-American tactical mobilizations for vouchers later inthis paper.

IDENTITY FORMATION AND SUBALTERN AGENCY: A RACED AND

GENDERED RECONCEPTUALIZATION

In order to develop a more nuanced conceptualization of the importanceof such ‘‘third space’’ groups in conservative formation, it will be useful nowto further sharpen our focus upon the process of what Apple and othertheorists have called ‘‘identity formation’’ (Apple, 1996; Apple et al., 2003).In the voucher example, identity formation occurs as various factions of theconservative alliance, African-American educational activists, and mostlylow-income women (and their families) in Milwaukee suture their intereststogether within tensely maintained (and constructed) alliances. In the earlieryears of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, discourses circulatingthrough the Milwaukee Public School system, as well as through the vou-cher alliance, positioned families and offered identities in particular ways.Primary among the subject positions in circulation among teachers,administrators, and other professionals in the Milwaukee Public Schoolswere those predicated on culturally based, racially based, and/or biologicallybased deficit models (Corporation for Educational Radio and Television,1993). African-American families fleeing public schools and embracing theproposed voucher system frequently cited instances in which public schoolfailure was blamed on the supposedly culturally rooted unruly behavior ofstudents of color. Similarly, families complained about the regularity withwhich their children were pathologized and abandoned to special educationprograms after being marked with disability labels (Corporation for Edu-cational Radio and Television, 1993).

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In contrast to this, school marketization efforts in Milwaukee seemed tooffer much more dignified subject positions to disenfranchised parents andguardians, perhaps most significantly that of ‘rational consumer�. Ratherthan pathologizing ‘Black� cultural forms through racist social scientificnormative discourses, neoliberal voucher advocates first positioned parentsand guardians as ideal consumers whose sole constraint consisted of artifi-cially limited market-defined choice.

An analysis predicated on questions of identify formation allows for thepossibility of a micro-level examination of the tactical choices parents andguardians make in negotiating their sets of perceived educational optionson a terrain that is not largely of their own choosing. Rather thanfocusing only on the structural dynamics around educational marketiza-tion which will likely further marginalize low-income communities of color(Lauder & Hughes, 1999; Whitty, Power, & Halpin et al., 1998), I wish tofollow Apple�s lead in taking seriously the everyday dilemmas, con-sciousness, and agency of voucher parents (mostly women) and theirfamilies as they attempt to negotiate educational structures which, in afunctionalist way, have not been designed with their best interests in mind(Apple, 1996; Apple, et al., 2003). Thus, while I am deeply concernedabout the likely outcomes of market-oriented educational forms, I alsowant to take utterly seriously how conservative educational mobilizationssucceed by seeming to speak to marginalized people�s very real fears anddesires. It is through understanding this articulation, as a matter of racedand gendered subject formation, that the process of conservative forma-tion will perhaps most effectively be interrupted and supplanted with amore socially democratic (and ultimately more effective) educationalvision.

Thus, seen from ‘‘below,’’ from the vantage point of many poor andworking-class women of color and their families, free market educationaldiscourses seem to open a space to African-American parents and guardiansin interesting and contradictory ways (and in a manner not always present inthe often pathologizing discourses of urban public schools). While posi-tioning low-income parents and guardians of color as rational educationalconsumers empowered to make the best choices for their children dehis-toricizes their agency by largely failing to see it as emerging within unequalmaterial and discursive relations of class, race, and gender power, neoliberaldiscourse at the same time allows parents and guardians to be seen, heard,and understood, and perhaps most importantly to act, in ways that are oftensimply not possible within the pathologizing frames that frequently domi-nate everyday life in urban public schools.

To approach this question of how offered subject positions are tactically‘‘taken up’’ and ‘‘inhabited’’ by parents and guardians, we are aided by


critical cultural theorists such as Michel de Certeau. De Certeau wouldargue that the mostly female parents and guardians using vouchers inMilwaukee are never passive or without agency within this process ofsubject formation. They, to use one of his terms, ‘‘make do’’ within theidentity options that are made available to them, turning subject positionsas much as possible to purposes that they feel will best serve their andtheir families� educational and social interests (Apple, 1996; de Certeau,1984).

Such a focus on identity formation as a component of subalternagency allows us to discern that the articulations and alliances formedaround vouchers in Milwaukee are much more transient, ephemeral,opportunistic, and unstable than current literature, including Apple andOliver�s ‘‘Becoming Right’’ piece, implies. Nevertheless, despite the oftentransient nature of such conditional alliances, crucial and lasting gainsare in fact won by educational conservatives as a result of the reformsthat these alliances are able to engender. The effect of voucher mobili-zations on legislation and on the global currency of private vouchers isnot nearly as ephemeral as the conditional alliances, which undergird andenable their initial success.

As I argued earlier, a more nuanced theorization of groups such as thegrassroots supporters of vouchers in Milwaukee—which cannot be ade-quately posited either as dominant elements within a hegemonic alliance, oras relatively ideologically unformed and ‘ordinary� individuals articulatedinto the Right as a result of the state�s intransigence—is crucial to theproject of a more full understanding of the Right�s continued success indismantling key vestiges of the American social democratic accord.

The current under-emphasis on the importance of subaltern agency inhegemonic successes might result from our inclination to theorize elementswithin conservative modernization as ‘groups� unproblematically embody-ing ‘ideal types,� rather than as ‘discursive tendencies.� While some indi-viduals and organizations can be more or less correctly categorized into oneof Apple�s four elements, there are also (almost) always contradictory ten-dencies within these groups and individuals. The fact that these tendenciesare not embodied as ideal types, but rather are mediated in contradictoryways, actually expands conceptually the spaces for progressive rearticula-tion within the formation of these subjectivities.

Since we still want to foreground the ways in which these discoursesconstruct and are constructed by real social actors, thus sidestepping thedisposition of some post-structural theorists to see the world as made uponly of competing discourses which somehow exist beyond history andhuman agency (Pedroni, manuscript in progress), we may want to refer toApple�s four elements as ‘embodied tendencies.� To not do so restricts our

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likelihood of apprehending the importance of subaltern groups in hege-monic successes, since subaltern groups, unlike those closely aligned withmore powerful embodied tendencies, often act tactically, in a manner sug-gested by de Certeau, and often not through the deployment of complex andlargely internally cohesive discourses which seek to (re)narrate a set ofrelationships between elements such as the state, the economy, individuals,and the social formation (de Certeau, 1984). The ability to materializeelaborate and cohesive intellectual discursive production is more typically aprivilege of the powerful, who, as de Certeau suggests, shape and control theterrain upon which ideological and material battles over such things asaccess to education are fought. On the other hand, subaltern yet politicallysavvy groups, such as the African-American and Latino supporters of pri-vate school vouchers in Milwaukee, quite often operate in a tactical rela-tionship to power, sensing the need to act within the spaces that thepowerful provide, sometimes in ways that creatively turn the strategicdeployments of the powerful back against the powerful, and other times inways that are ultimately self-defeating for subaltern groups, as powerfulgroups accomplish their objectives precisely because of tactical ‘poaching� bysubaltern groups. This latter scenario, I would argue, is the far more likelylong term outcome of African-American support of private school vouchersin Milwaukee.

In fact, an analysis of data gathered in a series of interviews and obser-vations of parents and guardians, as well as other African-American vou-cher advocates in Milwaukee, indicates that this is indeed the case (Pedroni,2004). African-American articulation to neoliberal interventions includingvoucher programs seems to be largely tactical and opportunistic, rather thanideologically disciplined. As shall also be evident in my brief analysis ofinterviews in the next section, the African-American voucher advocates inquestion rarely offered ‘intact� neoliberal or neoconservative discourses asunderpinning their investment in vouchers. Although their discourses in-cluded occasional neoliberal and neoconservative elements, they also con-tained other elements which ran significantly counter to each of thesediscourses. Because of their tactical relationship to dominant groups, andbecause of their investment in other mobilizations that were clearly welloutside the parameters of conservative modernization, the mostly femaleAfrican-American supporters of vouchers in Milwaukee that I studied didnot ‘become Right,� as far as identity formation is concerned, despite theirtactical investment in neoconservative and neoliberal subject positions(Apple, 1996; Apple et al., 2003). Two brief examples from Milwaukee willhelp illustrate this point.


LISTENING TO AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN SUPPORTING

VOUCHERS IN MILWAUKEE

Cherise Robinson and Laura Fordham (their names have been changedto preserve their anonymity) are African-American parents and guardians ofchildren utilizing vouchers provided through the Milwaukee ParentalChoice Program to attend participating parochial and nonsectarian privateschools. The interviews from which I draw this brief analysis were recordedin 1998 shortly before the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the constitu-tionality of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, thus lifting an AppealsCourt injunction predicated on issues of separation of church and state. Thetwo interviews,2 conducted by a Bradley Foundation-supported European-American professional videographer closely affiliated with neoconservativeCatholic educational organizations in Milwaukee, take place in Madison,Wisconsin, shortly after a well-publicized speak-out and rally among vou-cher proponents protesting the injunction (phone interview with videogra-pher, April 22, 2000).

Cherise Robinson is the grandmother of a five-year-old child who beganthe school year in a private non-sectarian school participating in the Mil-waukee voucher program. Her granddaughter was soon relocated to apublic day care facility after the voucher school in which she was enrolled‘‘had to close before the year was up.’’ Despite this disruption, Ms. Rob-inson is stridently positive about her granddaughter�s advances in her initialmonths of private school attendance. ‘‘If you were to talk to her, you wouldthink that she�s about 7 or 8 years old. And judging from the other childrenthat are in Milwaukee Public Schools, she�s at a level now of at least asecond or third grader. And I know that this is because of her beginnings.’’

Robinson attributes this success to the existence of small class sizes andgreater individual attention—something which she identifies as lacking inmany of Milwaukee�s urban public schools. ‘‘I think it�s because of theindividual attention that she�s able to get in the private schools. And not somuch individual, but not so many students. That the teacher has more timefor her in whatever her little situation may be.’’

Implicit in Robinson�s assessment is a juxtaposition of the attentive pri-vate school teacher with the less attending public school teacher. That whichfacilitates the better attention of the private school teacher, however, is thatshe has ‘‘not so many students;’’ she does not face the same overcrowdedclassroom conditions as her public school counterpart. This implicit char-acterization of the public school teacher beset by overcrowding contrastsmarkedly with the figure of the public teacher in the interviewer�s ownnarrative, in which public schools are seen as failing not because of over-crowded classrooms, but because of their monopolization by teachers�

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unions which protect unworthy teachers while sheltering grossly bloated andinefficient school bureaucracies from market discipline (Creative MediaServices, 1998).

An indictment of overcrowded classrooms, rather than union monopoliesand a lack of competitive educational markets, then, points to a diagnosisand prescription for public schools which can only sit awkwardly within theneoliberal frame of ‘‘market efficiency/inefficiency.’’ We can begin toimagine other less awkward articulations with Ms. Robinson�s concerns.

But this is not the only juncture at which Ms. Robinson�s frame exists intense relationship with that of the interviewer and the various fragments ofthe neoliberal and neoconservative voucher alliance with which he is allied.Robinson describes her active defense of the voucher program as follows:‘‘It seems as if there are some who say that certain children shouldn�t have acertain type of education. And it seems to me that choice is saying everychild should have the best education that they can get.’’ Robinson under-stands choice as the ability of every child, regardless of socioeconomic orother circumstances, to obtain high quality education. This sense of choice isarticulated with models of consumer choice in marketization discourses onlyas the result of considerable work.

The daughter of the second interview subject, Laura Fordham, attendsa private nonsectarian elementary school in which her mother also worksas the admissions chairperson. For Ms. Fordham, the overriding factor inusing a voucher to choose this particular school is its proximity to thefamily�s home. In Milwaukee, this is not an inconsequential issue. With theadvent of busing, many public neighborhood schools in the urban corewere closed. This has presented significant difficulties related not just tothe daily transportation of children; distance has also formed a significantobstacle to parental involvement in the public schools, particularly whenmany families do not own cars. This in turn has exacerbated the sense thatpublic schools are frequently out of touch with the communities theyserve.

As Ms. Fordham explains, ‘‘If she has to go back to the publicschools, then she would be bused possibly across town. Well, I would notallow for her to be bused across town. First thing�s, she�s a chronicasthmatic kid. And for her to be bused, it would be impossible.’’ Ms.Fordham�s decision to relocate her child to a neighborhood private schoolcame only after considerable effort to make the public school optionwork. ‘‘I could not transport her to school back and forward every day. Idid that for her first year. . . that was 17 and a half miles away. So whenshe become more chronically ill, and my husband becomes ill, she had tostop going to school there, because I couldn�t take her to school. Plus wecouldn�t afford it.’’


Ms. Fordham is nostalgic for a time ‘‘when the schools were so muchbetter than they are now, the public schools at least. . . You could go toschool down the street and meet your neighbors.’’ That is, public schoolswere also important centers of life within the community. ‘‘Now, the waythe [public] schools are going, they tell you where your kid can go. Wherewith the Choice program, you�re able to put your kid. . . where you wantthem to go. . . And you�re able to afford it.’’ Today in Milwaukee, privatevoucher-accepting neighborhood schools are often called upon by parentsand guardians to fulfill the community role the neighborhood public schoolsonce played. ‘‘And that�s important, because we find that for our privateschools are closer around in the circle than public schools are.’’

Beyond the absence of public schools within some Milwaukee urbanneighborhoods, Ms. Fordham also characterizes the experiences of manypublic school children in the following way: ‘‘They are in the classroom, andthey�re crowded. And if a kid is a little slower learning he [doesn�t] have thetime to take. . . so after a while he�ll just stop going to school, or he�ll missschool because he didn�t know his lesson, or he had nobody to pay attentionto him.’’ Ms. Fordham�s description of public school classrooms as over-crowded and under-resourced resonates with earlier criticisms by Ms.Robinson. Her assumptions concerning the troubles of some urban publicschools differ sharply from those of the interviewer and the neoliberal andneoconservative constituencies he represents.

This divergence of assumptions between Ms. Fordham and the inter-viewer is furthermore evident as they negotiate the content of the interview.For example, in relation to the issue of consumer choice within educationalmarkets, he asks, ‘‘Why should that be your choice? As a parent, or as agrandparent, or as a family member, why should you have the right to[choose] that?’’ While the interviewer positions Ms. Fordham as a consumerwithin an educational marketplace, she answers from a very different subjectposition—that of a member within a community and society: ‘‘One of thethings I feel is going to improve our society is if we can educate our kidsbetter.’’ Again, Ms. Fordham�s ‘‘parent as community member’’ sits awk-wardly with the interviewer�s own ‘‘parent as consumer.’’

DISARTICULATION AND REARTICULATION

These brief excerpts represent, at the micro-level, an important instanti-ation of the tense, contradictory, and often successful process of articulationand conditional alliance-building within the movement for vouchers. Whilethe tensions and contradictions in such articulations are vividly evidenced inthe differing purposes, resources, and identities which the interviewer and

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the two interview participants bring to the interviews, clearly they also sharea limited common purpose which allows them to stand together ‘in the sameroom,� however momentarily and awkwardly. Both the interviewer (as awhite, male neoliberal and neoconservative advocate of educational mark-etization and Catholic schools) and the interview subjects (as Black femaleparents and/or guardians concerned about their children�s education) areinterested in furthering at least a specific, limited version of ‘parental choice�in Milwaukee. One can imagine that these parents and guardians, in con-trast to the interviewer, are unlikely to favor ‘choice� beyond the low-incomeparameters within which it was initially established.

In significant ways, then, the subaltern and tactical agency that Ms.Robinson, Ms. Fordham, and other African-American parents, guardians,and community leaders have demonstrated within the contested terrain overvouchers is a testament to the strength of their potential political agency,rather than, as is sometimes suggested, an indication of naıve submission tohegemonic conservative educational and economic discourses. This remainstrue even if these parents, guardians, and community leaders are ultimatelyproven wrong, as I believe they will be, in their assertions that their actionswill be of maximum benefit in the long run not just for their children butalso for other children left behind in newly market-disciplined urban publicschools. And I believe this tactical agency will in all likelihood be furtherinstantiated in future mobilizations, quite possibly around other tradition-ally conservative themes, many of which have long been issues of concernfor large numbers of African-American families, including support forschool prayer and ‘religious freedom,� as well as antipathy toward abortionand the interests of sexual minorities. African-Americans (as well as othersubaltern groups) are not essential Democrats, although in recent historymany have tactically aligned themselves with this party. I feel this last pointbears repeating; critical theorists and others on the educational left shouldrecognize that African-American articulation to the Democratic Party andother powerful liberal, progressive, and centrist groups has almost alwaysbeen tactical rather than strategic. To theorize African-Americans as‘intelligent� when they show unquestioning loyalty to the Democratic Partyand other liberal causes, even when these take their support for granted asthey drift to the Right on significant issues, and ‘foolish� when they tacticallyparticipate in other, sometimes more conservative, alliances (such as thataround vouchers) grossly misrepresents African-American agency, and be-trays what I feel is a racist and gendered essentialization of Black intelli-gence. Subaltern groups have always needed to tactically associate inseemingly contradictory ways with powerful groups and individuals, such asthe Heritage Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the DemocraticLeadership Council, in order to seek to protect their interests.


Reflecting on the pivotal role played by subaltern groups, I want tosuggest that the conservative hegemonic alliance in the late 1980s recognizedthat it almost wielded the power to get vouchers through. Although by itselfthe hegemonic alliance was not able (yet) to successfully realize its mark-etization agenda concerning education and vouchers, the Right could‘stretch� its power by bringing parts of a traditional liberal constituency—aportion of African-American low-income families—on board. Articulatingthe privatization agenda in education to these parents and guardians� ‘goodsense� and perceived interests would enable the Right to tip the scales ofeducational power away from an alliance of liberal groups includingteachers� unions, other trade unions, the ACLU, People for the AmericanWay, the NAACP, the Urban League, and feminist and environmentalorganizations and toward the amalgamation of groups pursuing conserva-tive modernization in education. Given the Wisconsin political climate ofthe late 1980s, in which progressives wielded very little power, coupled witha long and historic movement among African-American families in Mil-waukee for community-controlled schools that would protect their childrenfrom the sometimes reprehensible racial practices of Milwaukee PublicSchools, Milwaukee presented itself as an ideal battleground upon which theconservative alliance might win crucial ideological battles over the charac-ter, form, and funding of education in the United States (Carl, 1996). Such avictory would also have promising implications for farther-reaching con-servative goals involving the broad privatization of the public sphere and thederesponsibilization of the state (Clarke & Newman, 1997).

In the process, the immediate and long-term conservative agendas aroundprivatization in education and elsewhere would not be the only part of thehegemonic project that would be served. It will be useful here to reinvokethe conceptualization Michael Apple has proposed of the conservativehegemonic alliance as constituted through a series of tensely negotiated andmaintained compromises among disparate but overlapping elements (Apple,1993, 1996, 2001). In regard to the contestation of such a tense alliance,critical theorists in education and elsewhere have correctly argued that onestrategy to forward the agenda of a radically democratic social and edu-cational project might be to carefully discern these fault lines within thehegemonic alliance so that potential differences among the different posi-tions might be exacerbated, thereby pushing the project of conservativemodernization in the direction of crisis. Just as progressives hope to stra-tegically promote their interests through capitalizing on these points ofsuture on the Right, so too the Right has an interest in continuing to cap-italize on and subvert tensions among real and potential progressive allies.One of the fault lines that the Right seems to have successfully discerned andtargeted is the articulation within what we might call the traditional


progressive alliance between African-American families and teachers� un-ions such as the NEA and the AFT. By infusing the common sense of theUnited States social formation with narrativized images of self-interested[discursively white] teachers� unions protecting their own jobs and ‘enrich-ing� themselves with little concern for the students of color who increasinglymake up our public school populations, the Right may be succeeding indestroying residual elements of a progressive alliance at the same time that itstrengthens its own ascendancy (Holt, 2000). Calls by national teachers�unions for the improvement of teachers� working conditions through ‘zerotolerance� in student discipline, while in some ways justifiable, have likelyonly contributed to these tensions. Regarding this disarticulation betweenteachers� unions and African-American families, I want to assert that acareful appraisal of such educational dynamics in contexts such as Mil-waukee will be quite instructive in both the theorization and the contesta-tion of this process of disarticulation among potential and actualprogressive allies.

For many African-American urban leaders who have, sometimes eventepidly, supported vouchers, the reaction of some progressive whites hasbeen quite illuminating. It is characteristically a reaction which, previouslycontent to see Blacks as ‘wisely� coalescing with predominantly white pro-gressive initiatives, now sees these same Blacks as foolishly allying them-selves with dangerous forces. A tacit message appears to be here that Blacksdon�t know the real dangers of allying with ‘‘reprehensible’’ conservativepeople; only white liberals know that. It smacks of a feeling of the ‘whiteman�s burden,� where liberal white educators are now angry at the ‘Blackchildren� who they had gathered under their umbrella, because those chil-dren, many of them women, are showing independence of mind.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CRITICAL EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

In this paper I have utilized a conceptual and empirical discussion of thediscursive overlaps, tensions, and power differentials among constituents ofthe Milwaukee voucher alliance to suggest the importance of [gendered,raced, and classed] subaltern agency and identity formation within theprocess of conservative formation. Based on the conceptual and empiricaljuxtapositions in which I engaged, I argued for an expansion and recon-ceptualization of the theories of conservative modernization offered byApple and Oliver in their essay, ‘‘Becoming Right.’’ The modificationswhich I have proposed incorporate processes of [raced and gendered]identity formation and subaltern agency among ‘‘strange bedfellows’’ as keycomponents of the fragile and uneven process through which conservativeeducational mobilizations experience varying degrees of success or failure.


I have argued that the success and maintenance of such educationalprojects is predicated neither on a direct imposition of a conservative edu-cational agenda onto unwitting and passive subaltern populations (e.g.,mostly female voucher parents and guardians of color), nor on the ‘wellingup from below� of a reified [parental] identity that somehow fits seamlesslyinto conservative educational mobilizations. Rather, utilizing but alsoexpanding Michael Apple�s theories of conservative modernization, I havepointed to the formation of fleeting and highly conditional alliances amongdifferently empowered and socially situated social actors. Within this pro-cess there is always a highly structurally and discursively limited agency onthe part of those dispossessed mobilized over the issue of their consent, aswell as a contested discursive space within which potentially more sociallydemocratic articulations and educational visions might be formed.

It is my hope that this retheorization builds upon Apple�s crucial work inhelping critical educators envision strategies for rearticulating marginalizedfamilies� educational concerns to ultimately more effective, meaningful, anddemocratic educational reform. Hopefully the conceptual modifications thatevidence such as the interviews with Black women voucher parents andguardians suggests will assist researchers in other contexts to discern similarprocesses and trajectories. We can imagine that tactical investments infleeting conservative alliances and subject positions among marginalizedcommunities will play an increasingly significant role both in the UnitedStates and elsewhere.

NOTES

1. In fact, the importance of such ‘strange bedfellows� to the Rightist project seems evident

even in a cursory consideration of other, in some ways parallel, debates. For example,

the call for redemption and responsibility among African-American men by Minister

Louis Farrakhan could be argued to have been a key element in considerable black

acceptance of recent welfare (and penal) reform. Similarly, comparing and contrasting

the mobilizations around penal reform and welfare reform in the mid 1990s seems to

indicate quite different subject positions made available to those addressed in the two

temporally proximate reforms. On the one hand, we have in the ‘throw away the key�mentality of penal reform a subject who is beyond rehabilitation. On the other hand, in

WorkFare, we have an errant subject who can be rehabilitated through state and per-

sonal intervention. That these two significant blows to the social democratic accord

could be promulgated in such different ways solely by the same dominant groups seems

unlikely. My suspicion is that further analysis would yield key subaltern players around

the periphery in ‘conditional alliance� with dominant groups, in ways similar to the Mil-

waukee ‘parental choice� case.2. Audiovisual copies of these interviews were given to the author directly by the videogra-

pher. Complete transcripts of the interviews upon which the analysis here is based, as

well as copies of the original audiovisual interviews, are available from the author upon

request.


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Market Movements and the Dispossessed: Race, Identity, and Subaltern Agency among Black Women Voucher Advocates

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