Corporatized Education: Reshaping Schooling and Educational Governance in Liberia

Tyler Hook

My dissertation examines corporatized educational reform and schooling through the Liberian Educational Advancement Program (LEAP). This partnership between the Ministry of Education, social impact investors, and largely for-profit corporate school chains attempts to align social and educational policy and development in Liberia with the ?invisible heart of the market? through increased surveillance, financialization, and corporate management. My dissertation explores how these processes of corporatization, which typically follow moments of ?crisis,? have transformed educational landscapes, creating new forms of governance and development that potentially reproduce racialized systems of inequality. My 16-month multi-sited ethnographic study focuses on how new configurations of power, governance, profit, and management within LEAP?s corporatized model of educational development materialized and are experienced by teachers, administrators, and families on the ground. As corporations increasingly become key actors in educational reform and schooling, moving into roles previously held by the state, merging educational development with profit, and attempting to align and narrow educational policy and practice with supposedly value-neutral and ?post-racial? technologies, my dissertation attempts to show what kinds of governable spaces, subjects, and forms/opportunities of resistance are produced.

About Tyler Hook

Tyler Hook is a joint doctoral student in Educational Policy Studies (concentration in Comparative and International Education) and Cultural Anthropology. His research examines the intersections of race/racism, capitalism, and educational development. He holds a B.A in History, Political Science, and Religion from Hope College, an MSc in Africa and International Development from the University of Edinburgh, and an M.A. in International Educational Development from the University of Pennsylvania. His research has been supported by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and a Fulbright-Hays DDRA. Prior to UW, Tyler worked as a teacher in the United States, Burundi, Thailand, and Japan, and as a teacher trainer with the Peace Corps in Malawi.