Christien Philmarc Tompkins

CHRISTIEN PHILMARC TOMPKINS, Rutgers University, Brunswick, New Jersey, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2021 to aid research and writing on “Reconstructing Race: The Experimental Labor of New Orleans Education Reform” resulting in a book, “A Burdensome Experiment: Race, Labor, and Schools in New Orleans after Katrina,” University of California Press, 2024. In post-Katrina New Orleans, the unprecedented conversion of ninety percent of district schools into privately managed non-union charter schools has catalyzed intense debate over the future of public schooling. A labor ethnography based on 18 months of fieldwork, A Burdensome Experiment, finds that New Orleans’ citywide experimentation with private management and education labor has led to the proliferation of novel ecologies of racialized governance, where educators, policymakers, and entrepreneurs reconfigure and mobilize race under emergent expert cultures that work to transform the exceptional violence and immediacy of the early Post-Katrina reconstruction into normalized infrastructures and enduring futures. This book argues that the technical, technologically mediated, and increasingly dispersed and fragmented labors of education in New Orleans’ privatized school system are about more than economic rationality or pedagogical responsibilities. It finds that the radical transformation of education work is a crucible in which imaginaries of a free society are contested and furthermore draws attention to the anti-black entailments of prevailing notions of freedom through market choice, entrepreneurialism, and design.