Place and pedagogy. On the production of race through marginalization and essentialization of the meaning of place.

‘Place’ represents an important dimension in people’s lives, as lives are shaped by local and national contexts and the objective and subjective relations people have to their environments. Nevertheless, dominant educational policy and discourse is characterized by paradoxical understandings of the relations between ‘place’ and pedagogical practice. On the one hand, pedagogy is understood as ‘best practice’ or evidence-based methods, which draws on understandings of pedagogy as identical across borders and local communities. This leads to an universalization of pedagogy, and to the naturalization of specific knowledges and experiences. On the other hand, we see representations of certain local communities (‘ghetto areas’ and vulnerable neighborhoods) as requiring special pedagogy and special (limited) rights to parents, children and pedagogues (e.g. Brodersen 2019). This essentializes the meaning of place and its diverse, complex implications for people’s lives and pedagogical practice is invisibilized. This paradox between marginalization and essentialization naturalizes racial and class inequalities through processes, which can be discussed as scientific and institutional racism (Tate 1996), as place becomes a producer of and proxy for race (Norris & Billings 2017).