Spatial policing: Race, surveillance, and the politics of community language schools in White public-school spaces

Abstract This article draws on critically oriented scholarship at the intersection of surveillance, space, and race to explore the deep struggles over space between teachers and students at a public school in the U.S. and teachers and students at an Arabic community language school that rents the public-school facility on Saturdays. Evidence collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork suggests that processes of racializing surveillance (Browne 2012; Selod 2018) were materially enacted by public school actors as spatial regimes that regulated the micro-level spatial practices of the community-school teachers and students. These regimes, which I call spatial policing, sanctioned how spaces (e.g. classrooms, whiteboards, desks) could or could not be used by the community-school teachers and students and regulated where they could sit and what they could use and say in the space. I argue that these regimes of spatial policing served to constitute the public school as a White public space (Hill 1998) and socialized the community-school teachers and students into invisible and apolitical subjectivities. The findings illuminate the ways by which the politics of space can offer a generative lens to understating how the marginalization of racialized language speakers is spatially enacted and how it affects the teaching and learning of language in education spaces.