"Capital's Daisy Chain: Exposing Chicago's Corporate Coalition"
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
Volume 5, Number 1 (May 2007)
By Mambà Maestra ArrastÃa
This article uses the global city of Chicago as an urban exemplar of a thirty-year worldwide economic shift toward public (state) - private (corporate) partnerships. Advanced by racialized youth-development discourses in Chicago, private corporations, public education, and social housing are in alliance to transform “the problems of urban America.� This move to restore American cities to places of “safety� and “progress� is code for the modernized redevelopment of white and of color, poor and working class youth. My intention in this article is to highlight the insidious meta-narratives of American progress inherent in neoliberal youth development discourses for the purposes of marking them. I want to make it more difficult for the language and practice of American youth development to go unseen by educators and their students. My hope in providing Chicago as a case study is to critically attend to and expose a U.S. economy of socio-political methods and spatial practices deployed transnationally to ontologically manipulate youth, aggravate their core of decency, and produce them as either owners or low-wage-earning laborers.
Full article available at JCEP.
