Agential Schooling

Winner of the 2026 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book award, this book examines how schooling—the restrictive, oppressive, and disciplinary force in much U.S. education—is protean and has the agency to change in response to challenges. Posthumanist theories were engaged with to better understand the intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and discursive actors.

Utilizing participant observations, interviews, cognitive maps, diffraction, and theory, it argues that traditional humanistic approaches to oppression in U.S. education are inadequate to understanding the ongoing power of schooling. In conversation with these paradigms, this book lays out an agential realist (Barad, 2007) view of schooling and argues in favor of examining schooling itself as an agent, sustained and bolstered by a wide range of other agents acting in and around schools—from clipboards and handouts to adultism and racism. This approach offers a new perspective on how oppressive forces like racism, sexism, and adultism adapt and continue to operate in spaces deliberately designed to oppose them, including Ethnic Studies programs and YPAR projects. At the same time, this book rejects totalizing arguments about schooling's hegemony and shows how a wider recognition of nonhuman agency can help us not only understand but also work to resist such oppressions.

It will appeal to scholars, faculty, and upper-level students with interests in critical youth studies, educational equity, Ethnic Studies, youth participatory action research, and posthumanism.