Ujju Aggarwal
Ujju Aggarwal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning at The New School. Her research focuses on public education, urban space, gender, and racial capitalism. She is currently completing her first book, The Color of Choice: Raced Rights, the Structure of Citizenship, and Inequality in Education, a historically informed ethnography of choice as it emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States. Prior to joining The New School, Ujju taught at Sarah Lawrence College, was a Visiting Scholar at the Vermont Center for Fine Arts, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at University of Texas, Austin; and the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation.
Collected Work
Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education
What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families. As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.
“The Academy for Black and Latin Education: a Pedagogy of ‘Life in a Community’”
This article transports us to New York in the 1960s and the creation of community-organized academies for Black and Latinx people.
What’s Race Got To Do With It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality, 2nd Ed.
The first edition of What’s Race Got to Do With It (2015) addressed a moment when those working on the ground—activists, educators, young people, and families—were trying to understand and fight back against neoliberal education reforms (e.g., high stakes testing, school closings, and charter schools), while uncovering what race had to do with it all in the context of a supposedly post-racial United States. In the years since, the steady and grounded work of social movements has increased the visibility and critique of privatization, market-based reforms, and segregation; demonstrating the interlocking connections between racism and capitalism. In this period we have also seen an intensified attack on public education (alongside other public infrastructures) and a return to a more overt "racism as we knew it." This new edition of What’s Race continues the examination of neoliberal education reforms as they are being rolled back (or reworked) to track the changes and continuities of recent years—revealing the ways in which market-driven education reforms work with and through race—and share grassroots stories of resistance to these reforms. It is hoped that this new edition will continue to sharpen readers’ analyses concerning what we are working to defend and what we are working to transform, and provides a guide to action that emboldens the collective struggle for justice.
