Matthew Chrisler | Graduate Center of the City University of New York (original) (raw)
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Papers by Matthew Chrisler
Open Anthropological Research, 2021
Alongside a crisis of public health, COVID-19 has also engendered a crisis of social reproduction... more Alongside a crisis of public health, COVID-19 has also engendered a crisis of social reproduction in the domain of public education. Drawing on conversations and collaborations with K-12 education advocates in the Phoenix metropolitan area, this essay deploys an activist methodology to identify political struggles and turn the ethnographic lens onto the publics and political economies that shape them. After situating contemporary Phoenix schooling in the regional history of the southwest-turned-sunbelt, I examine emerging features of pandemic education in 2020: managed dissensus, caretaking achievement, and education technology enclosures. I retool the concept of "managed dissensus" to argue that, in polarizing debates about the pandemic, conservative politics shifted from consent to coercion in order to maintain priorities of privatizing education and "reopening" the economy. Further, as districts pursued virtual schooling, I show how an institutional project of caretaking achievement produced new patterns of alienation, disengagement, and punishment among teachers and students. Third, I consider how technology created unequal enclosures of parents and students in new gendered, racialized, and ableist regimes of education. As the pandemic continues into 2021, anthropologists should continue to examine public education and social reproduction as sites where state power, racism, and colonialism are expressed and transformed.
Conference abstracts by Matthew Chrisler
Reviews by Matthew Chrisler
Anthropology Now, 2012
Care in an abstract sense may be imagined as an unproblematic and fundamentally positive aspect o... more Care in an abstract sense may be imagined as an unproblematic and fundamentally positive aspect of social relations, imbued with sentiment and affection. In a political and social sense, it is often invoked as a moral imperative, particularly when it comes to humanitarian crises and threats to human life. However, a shift of attention to everyday experience reveals care to be as much about protection of bodies and life-sustaining social ties as it is about the broader social and economic structures of power within which care happens. Examples include the precariousness of access in privatized health care; exploitative, often invisible, labor; state responsibility blurred with governance and political control; and racialized and gendered constructions of value that shape which lives matter, how and to what ends. Rather than being solely an arena for the reproduction of social and biological forms of life, care closely intertwines the intimate and the political. Recent public debates about the changing nature and mechanisms of care provision, whether by national governments or international aid organizations, have shown the extent to which bodily integrity and well-being of the world’s population, especially the most vulnerable, are bound up with larger political projects. From proposals to cut spending on health care and food assistance in the U.S. to the steep increase in pharmaceutical prices in Egypt resulting from an International Monetary Fund–imposed currency devaluation, affordable health care and other life-sustaining services that were once the cornerstone of developmental states as well as liberal
Blog posts by Matthew Chrisler
Open Anthropological Research, 2021
Alongside a crisis of public health, COVID-19 has also engendered a crisis of social reproduction... more Alongside a crisis of public health, COVID-19 has also engendered a crisis of social reproduction in the domain of public education. Drawing on conversations and collaborations with K-12 education advocates in the Phoenix metropolitan area, this essay deploys an activist methodology to identify political struggles and turn the ethnographic lens onto the publics and political economies that shape them. After situating contemporary Phoenix schooling in the regional history of the southwest-turned-sunbelt, I examine emerging features of pandemic education in 2020: managed dissensus, caretaking achievement, and education technology enclosures. I retool the concept of "managed dissensus" to argue that, in polarizing debates about the pandemic, conservative politics shifted from consent to coercion in order to maintain priorities of privatizing education and "reopening" the economy. Further, as districts pursued virtual schooling, I show how an institutional project of caretaking achievement produced new patterns of alienation, disengagement, and punishment among teachers and students. Third, I consider how technology created unequal enclosures of parents and students in new gendered, racialized, and ableist regimes of education. As the pandemic continues into 2021, anthropologists should continue to examine public education and social reproduction as sites where state power, racism, and colonialism are expressed and transformed.
Anthropology Now, 2012
Care in an abstract sense may be imagined as an unproblematic and fundamentally positive aspect o... more Care in an abstract sense may be imagined as an unproblematic and fundamentally positive aspect of social relations, imbued with sentiment and affection. In a political and social sense, it is often invoked as a moral imperative, particularly when it comes to humanitarian crises and threats to human life. However, a shift of attention to everyday experience reveals care to be as much about protection of bodies and life-sustaining social ties as it is about the broader social and economic structures of power within which care happens. Examples include the precariousness of access in privatized health care; exploitative, often invisible, labor; state responsibility blurred with governance and political control; and racialized and gendered constructions of value that shape which lives matter, how and to what ends. Rather than being solely an arena for the reproduction of social and biological forms of life, care closely intertwines the intimate and the political. Recent public debates about the changing nature and mechanisms of care provision, whether by national governments or international aid organizations, have shown the extent to which bodily integrity and well-being of the world’s population, especially the most vulnerable, are bound up with larger political projects. From proposals to cut spending on health care and food assistance in the U.S. to the steep increase in pharmaceutical prices in Egypt resulting from an International Monetary Fund–imposed currency devaluation, affordable health care and other life-sustaining services that were once the cornerstone of developmental states as well as liberal