Refugee youth attend schools in every state in the United States. Yet, little is known about their schooling experiences or the ways in which schools engage their parents. In this paper, we resituate notions of parent involvement by focusing on the interactions between refugee parents and U.S. schools drawing on data collected during a twenty-six…

Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected…

Despite the central role schools have played in the resettlement of refugees, we know little about how principals, teachers, parents, and staff at community-based organizations interpret and negotiate national immigration policy and state education policies. Combing critical discourse analysis (CDA) and actor-network theory (ANT), we capture how…

This article focuses on the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the USA's broad sweeping federal education policy, in a persistently low-achieving school in which the majority of students are refugees and immigrants. Drawing on a 26-month ethnography, I reveal the ways in which a NCLB-guided school turnaround plan is enacted variably,…

In this paper, I utilize complementary features of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to trace and investigate issues of power, materiality, and reproduction embedded within notions of citizenship and civic engagement. I interrogate the often narrow and conservative political and public discourses in Arizona that…

Utilizing "assemblage," a notion associated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), we explore what discourses of transparency can, and cannot, accomplish in a network of education reform that includes schools, government agencies, and community organizations. Drawing on data collected between July 2011 and March 2013 in an…

Refugees in the US are often seen as risk-takers--those who engage in potentially harmful behaviors that simultaneously provide opportunity; with their perceived weaknesses in English language training, overall education, and US cultural capital, refugees are also frequently situated as being "at-risk" of not adapting to their new…

This article focuses on the response of educational leaders to No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) market-driven and sanctions-laden reforms as part of a political spectacle in which discourses link accountability and educational effectiveness to the advance of capitalism. Drawing on data collected during a multiyear ethnography of NCLB, this article…

The global movement of people alters our understandings of social mobility. Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected since January 2011 and utilize the notion of "assemblage" to document and analyze how disparate people, their material objects, and discursive practices are brought together to render refugees as educable, productive,…

In the United States (US), an increase in standardization, quantification, competition, and large-scale comparison--cornerstones of neoliberal accountability--have been accompanied by devices of transparency, through which various forms of school data are made available to the public. Such public reporting, we are told by politicians and education…

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools that do not make adequate yearly progress must offer afterschool tutoring, entitled "Supplemental Educational Services" (SES). Drawing on 40 months of ethnographic research and utilizing actor-network theory, this article shows principals co-opting the SES provisions to do what they determine is…