Main points: With this paper we aim to investigate how the relationship between education and emotion can be ethnographically traced through an autoethnography of our parental experience in relation to school marketization. Both authors of this paper have academic backgrounds in critical education studies, and we have previously published on the marketization of education, particularly in Sweden. We have a previous theoretical interest in understanding how ideologies are reinforced and challenged in education, but so far, we have failed to theorize how our experiences as parents of school children might partake in the operation of capitalist ideology in and through education. Thus far, in our previous attempts to understand marketization we have neglected parents’ school-market-anxiety, and our own role as prospective consumers of education within the late modern educational capitalism. We aim to share, critically analyze, and put into context some of the experiences we have had of being approached as consumers of education for our own children and the affective dimensions of these experiences.

Fieldwork methods: We investigate our different experiences and emotions of being addressed as parents on a school market by comparing memories, information from the local school authorities, and advertisements for private schools owned by a venture capital company that we have received in the form of postcards, catalogues, and via digital mails in our roles as parents of school children. 

Analytical methods: We argue for the need of critical concepts from a psychoanalytical (post-)Marxist tradition that can help us understand – and resist – the increasingly strong grip that a that a capitalist ideology has on contemporary Swedish education and its different actors. Our turn to a post-Marxist vocabulary enables us to connect the hyper-abstract impersonal structure of capitalism with our deeply personal experiences of how we come to embody this structure in our role as parents. We do this by critically compare notes of urban parenting in late capitalist educational landscape in the Swedish cities Gothenburg and Malmö, inspired by an autoethnographical methodology (Reed-Danahay, 2009).

Conclusions: The purpose here is to understand and make sense of our feelings of anxiety as inherently shaped by a neutralization of capitalist ideology (see e.g., Bauman, 1999), which we want to resist and move beyond. We specifically lean on the work of Mark Fischer (2009), Slavoj Žižek (2008), Jason Glyson (2021), and Matthew Clarke (2020) to critically examine the seemingly neutral state of (un)conscious parental anxiety in late capitalism.

References

Bauman Z (1999) In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity.

Clarke M (2020) Eyes wide shut: the fantasies and disavowals of education policy. Journal of Education Policy 35(2). Routledge: 151–167. DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2018.1544665.

Fisher M (2009) Capitalist Realism : Is There No Alternative? Winchester: O Books.

Glynos J (2021) Critical fantasy studies. Journal of Language and Politics 20(1). John Benjamins: 95–111. DOI: 10.1075/jlp.20052.gly.

Reed-Danahay, D (2009) Anthropologists, Education, and Autoethnography, Reviews in Anthropology, 38:1, 28-47, DOI: 10.1080/00938150802672931

Žižek S (2008) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London ; Verso.