Schools as public things: Parents and the affective relations of schooling

Abstract

This article takes up Bonnie Honig’s notion of ‘public things’ to conceptualise schools as sites of attachment and meaning that draw people into the relationships of care and concern that are crucial for democratic life. By linking this with Sara Ahmed’s theorisation of affective relations and use, we develop Honig’s idea that communities cultivate public things through their use of such things, at the same time as the things themselves shape the communities that care for them. Drawing on focus groups conducted with predominantly white Australian mothers, we examine how relational attachments and affective relations of care and concern circulate through the object of the school, shaping boundaries between self and Other, and experiences of community and public space. The article identifies two broad themes. First, it identifies white mothers’ desires for alignment between themselves and the school, articulated as seeing oneself reflected in the values of the school and community. Second, it argues that mothers’ affective relations with schooling were also expressed as racialised concerns about the potential risks of ‘Other’ communities attaching to the school, in ways that involved demarcating ‘self’ and ‘Other’. We argue that the analytic lens of public things draws attention to the ways that schooling imbricates parents in relational and mutually constitutive affective environments that speak to the collective power of public things.

Introduction

‘Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.’

‘The board-schools.’

‘Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future.’

This fictitious exchange between Sherlock Homes and Dr Watson captures a turn-of-the-century affective attachment to state schools (Conan Doyle, 1893/2000, p. 256). Writing in the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle would have been surrounded by the burgeoning spectre of board schools, imposing red-brick structures built predominantly in working-class and poor areas across England and spurred on by the 1870 Education Act. Schools are foundational social institutions: as Conan Doyle captures in this short dialogue. Schools hold hope (and dismay), signal the future (and curate the past), and house countless diverse memories and attachments. In this article, we work with Bonnie Honig’s (2017) notion of ‘public things’ to conceptualise schools as material ‘things’ with affective force through which a variety of relational attachments are made and remade. For Honig, public things are sites of attachment and meaning somewhere between things and humans which furnish our world, in which we ‘encounter others’, ‘act in concert’ and ‘share the experience of being part of something that is larger than ourselves’ (2017, p. 36). Their import, in other words, lies not in their ‘thingness’ per se, but in the affective relations and attachments that flow, in, out and around them; or rather how their thingness draws people into relationships of ‘care and concern’. It is the relations of and attachments to schools that are the focus of this article.

This focus emerged from our research on how parents engage with schools. We asked parents – in this case, predominantly white mothers in Australia – about their engagements with their children’s school. In their expressions of values and attachments, we found that a conceptualisation of the affective circuitries of self, the commons and the Other in relation to the school was necessary. Honig’s (2017) theorisation of public things provided a conceptual language through which to conceive parent engagement, supplying insights into the broader democratic significance of schools, including who is understood to be able to use and care for them. In this article, we focus on how school–parent relationships can be understood as central to the fabric of the affective relations of democracy, where the school becomes an object to deliberate upon and contest. By extending Honig’s theorisation of public things to schools, our research seeks to bring new insights to emerging literature on the affective and relational dimensions of public services, education and democracy.

First, we outline how we conceptualise schools as public things. In our research with parents in Australia, we encountered expressions of what and who is ‘common’ vis-a-vis the school. It became essential to think about otherness and difference including how these were produced in relational and affective ways. As Honig signals briefly in reference to the US context, public things have been ‘part and parcel’ of a regime of white supremacy, working not to equalise people into citizenship but rather to communicate differentiation and exclusion (2017, p. 24). We extend this thinking in dialogue with the work of Sara Ahmed (2004), who, like Honig, is concerned with understanding the relationships that form through the circulation of affect and emotions. Ahmed helps us to take account of how affective attachments to schools can also involve the production of boundaries which circulate and shape conceptions of self and Other. We conceive schools as vehicles through which emotions and values move between people and objects (in this case, parents and schools), and in doing so, contour experiences and understandings of school communities.

Second, we analyse qualitative data from focus groups conducted with Australian parents. We explore how this group of 22 mothers expressed understandings of self and Other in relation to notions of public purpose, public good and the publicness of schooling, and explore connections between their expressions of values and ideas of community and citizenship. Specifically, we discuss how they expressed affective relationships to schooling in two key ways: (1) how they understand schools to be (or not be) affirmative reflections of themselves, their families and their values; and (2) how they express conceptions of difference, otherness and what is ‘common’, in their understanding of schools as public things. In doing so, we illustrate how schooling imbricates parents in relational and mutually constitutive affective environments that speak to the collective power of public things.

Public things and the affective relations of schooling

Material things, Honig (2017) suggests, furnish our world, facilitate our attachments and imbricate us in relations of care and concern. These relations form the basis of her conceptualisation of ‘public things’. Honig extends this consideration of objects to public things – national parks, roads, libraries, for example – which, she claims, ‘furnish the world of democratic life’ (2017, p. 5) and constitute ‘democratic holding environments’ where ‘we experience lifelong the attachments and play that form and re-form all of us’ (2017, p. 54). For Honig, public things are the necessary conditions of democratic life that ‘constitute us, complement us, limit us, thwart us and interpellate us into democratic citizenship’ (2017, p. 5). Public things, she argues, press us into relations with others and involve us in matters not merely of our own choosing (2017, p. 34). Without them, Honig claims, we have little to deliberate about, organise around, or contest.

Honig’s theory has clear relevance for schools. Schools are commonly understood as vehicles for realising ‘better’ and ‘more productive’ versions of modern liberal democratic life. And as highlighted in the quote that opened this article, their material structure and presence is central to this (Darian-Smith & Willis, 2017). Yet, we know that the idea of schools as a bedrock of democracy and as great social equalisers is always only aspirational – mythic even – as histories of discriminatory, assimilative and segregated education show (Carleton, 2022; Givens, 2021; Marsden, 2023). Our goal in this article is not to defend the democratic credentials of schooling. Conceiving schools as public things invites consideration of the affective, relational and material attachments that circulate through them, and the broader affective attachments that underpin engagements with ‘the public’. With Honig, we conceptualise schools as democratic holding environments – the ‘laboratories of citizenship’ through which care and consideration for the world is expressed (2017, p. 54). Schools are ‘public things’ in part because of their buildings, classrooms and grounds, but primarily because they are ‘things around which we constellate, and by which we are divided and interpellated into agonistic democratic citizenship’ (2017, p. 36). In other words, the relations that schools imbue are what makes them public things, the objects of democratic life.

Taking this position has two important consequences. First, ‘public things’ are not necessarily state-owned or controlled. Honig favours a broader definition that may include things which, for instance, have hybrid forms of ownership or funding. They are public in the sense that they interpellate people into relationships with others. For us, therefore, we understand all schools to be ‘public things’ because of their centrality in imbuing care and concern for the ‘common’, even though some may be a more bounded ‘common’. This allows for consideration of how different forms of schooling produce different public attachments, entitlements, rights and communities. This perspective seems especially relevant in Australia – where our research has been conducted – as the long-standing recurrent government funding of private (independent and Catholic) schools brings private schools into the formal realm of governmental and public concern. Second, understanding schools as public things does not mean that they are a pregiven ‘good’. Citing the US context, Honig notes that attention to the objects (rather than subjects) of democracy highlights the ‘inequalities of race and the operations of white supremacy’ in the policing, surveillance and control of racialised bodies in public venues (2017, p. 25). Public things have long histories of colonial ‘dispossession, appropriation and accumulation’ (2017, p. 89). In Australia for instance, the contemporary heralding and defence of public schooling against neoliberal policy interventions often glosses over how public education was (and is) a decisive instrument of colonial power and violence (e.g. Marsden, 2022; Stein, 2020).

We follow Honig’s lead in conceptualising schools as sites where agonistic contest might be staged, and where different versions of the public are imagined and defended. As Honig urges, ‘public things depend on being agonistically taken and retaken by concerted action’ (2017, p. 91). Schools are powerful sites of agonistic contest, and thus, should not be conflated with state sovereignty and nor should they be abandoned. Drawing on Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015), we view whiteness in Australia as a structural force that is embedded into the state and any claim to public good, public service and publicness (see also Bargallie, 2020). The logics of ‘white possession’ have contoured political, cultural and social life since invasion in 1788 (Hage, 1998; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Whiteness is a form of symbolic capital, a location of structural advantage, a standpoint from which white people look at the world, and a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed (Ahmed, 2007; Frankenberg, 1993).

While Honig acknowledges that public things are ‘asymmetrically policed, restricted, controlled’ (2017, p. 25), we turned to Sara Ahmed (2004) to theorise the affective, embedded and dynamic social power that shapes them. Ahmed argues that emotions ‘move between bodies and signs’ and in doing so ‘play a crucial role’ in the surfacing of collective and individual bodies (2004, p. 117). ‘Emotions do things’, Ahmed claims; they align ‘individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments’ (2004, p. 119). Ahmed highlights the ways that affects bind people (and things) together, creating material realities through the circulation and accumulation of affective value (2004, p. 120). In doing so, Ahmed deepens an understanding of ‘things’ as the vehicles for expressing and contesting affective relations to the public. Most importantly, she tracks how affective relations between people and things contour imagined communities through feelings of fear, belonging, loathing and love; shaping taken-for-granted framings of self, other and community. More recently, and drawing on Honig, Ahmed has linked the ‘use’ of things as essential to our affective relations to things (2019, p. 40). For Ahmed, use leaves traces, involves friction, and can be both comforting and discomforting (2019).

Our figuring of the school as a public thing centres parents’ affective relationships to schools in their diverse expressions of ‘care and concern’ for schooling. Recently, Carol Vincent et al. (2018) suggested something similar: through the ‘mundane’ interactions between parents, staff and families, schools ‘affectively stretch beyond their institutional boundaries’ and provide ‘public sites of affective and invested social relations’ (p. 208). Yet, for the large part, recent literature has sought to understand the effects of an increasingly marketised schooling system that positions parents as consumptive users of their children’s education (e.g. Ball, 2003; Campbell et al., 2009; Ho et al., 2015; Proctor & Aitchison, 2015; Windle, 2009). Today, seeking an alignment of values – between self, family, school and community – is understood largely as an important dimension of how parents navigate complex school markets and participate in their children’s schooling (Ho et al., 2015; Proctor & Aitchison, 2015; Rowe & Lubienski, 2017). This is linked to a broader, neoliberal culture of ‘responsibility’ characterised by an emphasis on autonomous choice and the weighing of risk and benefit within a marketised context of deregulation and privatisation (Miller & Rose, 1990; Oyarzún et al., 2022; Trnka & Trundle, 2014).

Yet, these consumptive decisions have never purely been acts of rationality. As Honig explains in the US context, ‘white flight’ from the public to the private thing is part of a long-standing racial politics where the powerful abandon the democratised common (2017, p. 24). The circulation of affect is crucial to the delineation of certain subjects with objects of love or desire (such as the school), and in the surfacing of others as an imagined threat (Ahmed, 2004). In Australia in 2018, for instance, then conservative Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison explained that one of the reasons he sent his children to an independent, religious school was because he did not want them to experience ‘skin curling discussions about sexuality’ and ‘the values of others being imposed on my children’ (McGowan, 2018). Here, the affect of disgust converges with a pronouncement of individual values and the entitlement to school choice. In addition, a range of existing research has already demonstrated the ways in which schools refuse, deny, judge and affirm particular parental relations to schooling. Schooling rests upon normative versions of the ‘good’ (white, middle-class) parent, while producing relations of disdain and derision for minoritised parents and parenting (see e.g. Butler, 2015; Gewirtz, 2001; Lea et al., 2011; Reay, 2008; Reay et al., 2008; Vincent, 2000). Much of this research, informed by feminist thinking, has sought to develop an understanding of the ‘psychosocial’ aspects of parental – and specifically mothers’ – relationships to schools – in other words the ways in which social norms and inequalities are internalised and ‘take shape psychically’ (Reay, 2008, p. 1073). Mothers, of course, bear a significant amount of the emotional and physical labour of schooling, and motherhood is deeply shaped by schooling and the moral imperative for parental participation in it (see Gillies, 2006; Proctor, 2010; Reay, 2002). Despite not intending to focus on mothers in our research, all the parents who volunteered to be a part of our focus groups were mothers, perhaps reflecting the continued social division of labour around childrearing.

In this article, rather than focus on the internalisation of norms or on the individualised deliberations of school choice, we train our attention on relational attachments to the ‘public thing’ of schooling, articulated as expressions of parental engagements in schooling. In doing so, we seek to contribute to the emerging scholarship on the affective, emotional and relational dimensions of public services and education (e.g. Zembylas, 2016). Significant scholarship has begun to chart how to understand the place of ‘care’ in policy production and practice (e.g. Gill et al., 2017; Murphy, 2015; Puig de la Bellascasa, 2012). Much of this work seeks to reconceptualise ‘care’ away from existing solely – or primarily – in the domestic emotional sphere and to establish it as a part of a broader relational politics (Gill, 2017), and as both captured and exceeding neoliberal technologies of ‘responsibility’ (e.g. McCaw & Gerrard, 2022; McLeod, 2017). In this literature the affective relations of care and intimacy, like Honig, are central to ‘how we become attached and even responsible for entangled human and non-human others’, and explore what a ‘“good” response might be’ (Latimer & López Gómez, 2019 p. 256).

However, when it comes to schooling, existing research on affect has tended to focus on pedagogy, curricula and leadership (e.g. Heffernan & Mills, 2023; Miles, 2019; Zembylas, 2016). Here, we bring focused attention to the affective contours of parental relations of ‘care and concern’ for their children’s schools as public things. This article responds to the need for scholarly attention on ‘conventional’ spaces of care and concern (i.e. motherhood) and the broader relational politics of care and concern as attached to public things. In doing so, we demonstrate how the affective attachments to schooling are expressed through relational understandings of individual and community, of the self, the commons and the Other. The politics of care and concern, in other words, when it comes to the school-as-public-thing are deeply nested within judgements about the worth and character of the public.

Relations of care and concern: Self, Other and schools as public things

The research we draw on in this article is based on five, one-hour, online semi-structured focus groups conducted with 22 parents residing in the Australian states of Western Australia (13) and Victoria (9). Participants were recruited after expressing an interest in participating, following the completion of a quantitative and qualitative online survey on parent engagement with schools. Both the survey and focus groups were conducted as a part of a larger research project funded by the Australian Research Council that aimed to investigate parent engagement, with a focus on how parents engage with school decision-making. The context of this research is intensive policy reforms across the federation of Australia in the 2010s that aimed to secure and enhance school devolution and autonomy. As a federal system of governance, schooling in Australia is governed by subnational states and territories, and each of these has unique past and present arrangements for school governance and autonomy. Our project focused on two jurisdictions, one with a long existing history of school autonomy (VIC) and one which more recently inspired the broader national reform movement for devolution through its Independent Public Schools initiative (WA). It is also important to note that Australia has a highly marketised field of education, with government funds flowing to the private schooling sector and approximately one-third of all Australian children attending private schools (defined as both independent and Catholic schools).

Against the backdrop of this context, our research sought to better understand how the policy aspirations for improved parent engagement pronounced in the school autonomy reform agenda (Gerrard & Savage, 2022) were being understood and experienced within school communities. Because of widespread school closures during COVID-19, especially in Victoria, which limited our capacity to engage in school case studies, we chose an online parent survey and focus groups to garner parents’ experiences of engagement with schools. Here, we focus on the parents who participated in the focus groups. Of these parents, nine had children in primary school, eight had children in high school, three had children in both primary school and high school and one had older children who were no longer attending school. One participant did not indicate the age of their children. Importantly, while our research did not seek to focus on one cohort of parents, those who participated in the focus groups all identified as female mothers and overwhelmingly self-identified as White, Anglo, Caucasian or Australian (with just two noting Italian and African American heritage respectively). As such, and as discussed above, our analysis invariably surfaced insight into how affective relations with schooling are shaped by these mothers’ positionality to whiteness and – as we discuss below – their representations of ‘diversity’ as something separate to them. Our analysis highlights how these 22 mothers’ affective relations with schooling involve judgements about how the ‘self’ is aligned with schooling, what is ‘common’ about schooling, and whose version of the common is valued. In this article, then, white mothers’ expressions of their affective relations to schooling provide a case and a site for exploration of the idea of schools as public things.

Participants were asked about their perspectives on the following three broad areas: (a) opportunities and barriers to parent engagement at their school, (b) school governance, including specific decision-making bodies (e.g. school boards/councils) and (c) values, including how they see values shaped and reflected in school decision-making and the school community. The focus group sessions were recorded, transcribed, and then coded thematically, using an interpretative approach focused on exploring the ‘situated meanings’ (see Yanow, 2007) expressed by focus group participants in relation to our research aims. Specifically, we found that considerations emerged around parents’ expressions of values and attachments, and we examined transcripts with a particular focus on how these parents were articulating care and concern for schools, and what sort of affective attachments to schooling were being expressed. In what follows, we present our analysis with a focus on two core dynamics: (1) the desire amongst mothers for schooling to affirm their values and ideals, which we are suggesting represents a care and concern for ‘the self and the school’; and (2) how schools were understood as sites of (at times contested and problematic) public relationships between the self and Others’ values and actions. Across our analysis, we show how the affective relations that circulate around schooling are always relational, mutually constitutive, and bound up with desires for a sense of belonging and community that underscore understandings – and experiences – of public things. As we explore in the second section in the following analysis, these affective attachments are characterised also by concern with who gets a say, and judgements about ‘other’ parents.

Care and concern for ‘the self’ and the school

In this first section, we discuss these mothers’ experiences and understandings of engagement with their children’s schooling, and explore how the public thingness of schooling is lived and felt personally. Across the focus groups, seeing oneself reflected in, understood by and valued in the public space of the school was of paramount importance. The lens of public things allows us to read parents’ desires for alignment between themselves, the school and the schooling community as a form of affective relational politics. The public thingness of the school imbricates parents into relations, not always of their own choosing, and in this section, we discuss how for parents in our focus groups, the political and personal importance of schools was linked in part to the capacity of those schools to affirm and reflect their own values and identities. This was commonly expressed in terms of the importance of seeing oneself reflected and recognised in the values of the school and community, and thereby feeling affirmed and comfortable. At the same time, when those desires were thwarted, parents expressed feelings of frustration and discontent and conveyed assumptions that schools ought to work for them, as (predominantly) white parents. Importantly, collective pronouncements of ‘our’ school, values and community were often (though not always) expressed in neutral, ‘culture-free’ terms, reflecting the broader normalisation of Anglo white culture in Australian society (Hage, 1998).

For example, Sarah expressed that she lives ‘in a pretty close-knit community . . . where we have shared values, [and where the school] represents those values quite well’. Agreeing with Sarah in the same focus group, Theresa also reflected on the congruence between her values, her children’s and the school’s, suggesting: ‘It’s very much always been seen as a sort of three-way relationship between students, school and parents’. In another focus group, Julia put it this way:

I think our school does embrace those values, like help each other spending time outdoors being healthy, minimizing waste, recycling. So, I do see those, those values really embraced and, as you know, once the school pushes them, or you get the children [to] embrace them, and they bring them back home.

Seeking affirmation of one’s values and seeing them reflected in the school illustrate how public things, like schools, represent a convergence of the personal and the public, whereby a sense of belonging can be realised (or repudiated) through a perception of being valued and recognised in a public environment. As these quotes demonstrate, these mothers’ desires for an alignment between schooling and parenting values and approaches signal a desired synchronicity between home and school. In this sense, schools-as-public-things are invariably interpellated into parental strategies, approaches and ideals.

When asked about how their children’s school engages them, participants across the focus groups expressed a want to be a part of the public settings and processes that constitute schooling. Having a voice and being heard were clear ways in which parents wanted to experience their own relationship to schooling:

So, there’s surveys from time to time about that type of stuff, so I think that’s good that we’re kind of, for those who want to have a voice, or want to have . . . input, they had the opportunity to. (Janet)

I think that a real, a school that really values the parental engagement and actually is successful from it are those ones who listen to the parent groups, and they actually make policies according to the parents, the bulk of the community. (Maria)

I definitely agree that parents should be involved. In terms of that, if you have a working relationship between two parties, everything just flows so much better if the parents feel like they’re being heard. (Bonnie)

These comments illustrate how schools as public things are not just ‘public’ in an abstract sense, but are public in how they bring people together in concert to act upon and through the school to express relations of care and concern for the world. This accords with Honig’s argument that while neoliberalism may have eroded state institutions’ claims to democratic action in concert, there are nonetheless dispersed and relocated alternatives that ‘on behalf of and in relation to public things’, seek modes of collaborative decision and future making (2017, p. 27). In these quotes, claims of shared values are deployed as powerful vehicles through which to express desires for recognition and affirmation, and to legitimate the want for influence and control over schooling. Importantly, the use of collective pronouns and nouns such as ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘community’ and ‘parents’ illustrates how collective bodies are surfaced through the circulation of desires to be seen, heard and listened to in the context of schooling – in other words, to be recognised, included and affirmed. While participants sought an affirmation of themselves (and their parenting), which could be read as particular and individualised desires, in staging those claims upon the public ground of the school, they invariably invite two things: forms of contest and deliberation over those claims and aspirations, and an attention to the object of those claims – the school itself. As Honig notes:

. . . things have agency enough to thwart or support human plans or ambitions, and we do well to acknowledge their power and, when appropriate, to allow that power to work on us or work to lessen or augment it. (2017, p. 28)

Across the focus groups, the calling forth of ‘our’ local community vis-a-vis the school appeared as an extension of parenting and the kinds of experiences and relationships that parents hoped for their children. While this seems indicative of an attempt to impress their personal values and aspirations upon the school community, equally, when we think from the angle of public things, it might also be seen as an acknowledgement of the enduring power of the school to interpellate parents, children and teachers into a (sometimes fractious) public of mutual concern. Theresa, for instance, said,

I think also very much it’s about our place in terms of you know our local community and giving kids that that sense of place, that they belong somewhere and an understanding that they are part of this community and that they’re responsible as they grow up to be to be part of it. So that comes through, I think, in in the way our school operates.

Theresa’s comments demonstrate how the public thingness of the school is about its situatedness in the local community and the kinds of relations it produces. This was also Janet’s view, who posited that a ‘whole community approach’ was about ‘active decision making from parents’, ‘healthy respect for the different stakeholders’ and ultimately about creating a community around ‘the children to help them thrive and flourish’.

Importantly, participants also expressed discontent and frustration when opportunities to be seen and heard in the context of the school were impeded and their desires were thwarted. For example, narrating a very different experience to those who spoke of relations of alignment and recognition, others identified feeling undervalued and ignored:

I find that we are constantly being dictated to and told when we will do things and how we will do things with no opportunity for us to sort of go actually, that doesn’t really work for us. (Rosie)

For Rosie, the emotion of frustration is connected to experiences of being outside the realm of control and influence of the school. She described a specific instance where the school decided without consultation to reschedule an important milestone for her child, meaning very few family members or friends could attend. She reflected: ‘It’s just stupid, we’re not involved in the decision. We were dictated to. We were told if you wanna do it, that’s when it’s going to happen.’

These sentiments are unsurprising in many ways: these frustrations reflect the expectation that decision-making practices within the school ought to work for parents. For example, for Amy, opportunities to have a voice and influence school decision-making were essential for parents, and when not working as expected resulted in feelings of being ignored:

I think that parents need to feel that they have some degree of, or some, a mechanism to be able to feel like they can provide feedback that will actually help in decision making, because otherwise . . .you just feel like you’re not being heard.

Broken expectations of certain forms of participation in public spaces, such as being able to contribute to schooling practices and decisions, produce a sense that the ‘public thingness’ of schooling is not operating as these parents think it should be. For these predominantly white parents, a prevailing sense of entitlement to the school as public thing is reflected in both their desires for alignment, and their expectations (and frustrations if thwarted) to exercise control in the processes of school: in other words, surfacing conceptions of ‘self’ and ‘us’ in relation to the school. We turn now to a discussion of how the affective circuitries of schooling surface conceptions of ‘self’ and ‘Other’.

Care and concern for ‘the Other’ and school

Participants’ discussions about the alignment between the self and the school were largely narrated by parents in ‘neutral’ terms and from locations of implicit belonging– in ways that reflect the normalised dominance of whiteness across Australian culture and society (see Lentin, 2020; Proctor & Sriprakash, 2017). At the same time, these mothers’ affective attachments to schools were intrinsically bound up with producing notions of ‘them’ and ‘other’, through which notions of ‘the public’ – both as an actual participatory space at their children’s school and as an idea associated with schooling as a site of ‘the commons’ – became troubled and contested. These predominantly white/Anglo identifying mothers largely positioned ‘diversity’ as something outside of their own experience to be contended with. Discussions in focus groups about how these parents engaged with, and saw their values reflected in the school also involved concerns about racialised and classed differences, particularly concerns about who gets to shape the values and practices of the school. These commentaries highlight how the circulation of affects around the public thing of the school produces boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

For some participants, contemplation on the question of parental engagement prompted consideration of the limits and inequalities of formalised forms of participation in schooling for racialised parents and children. Tamson, for instance, reflected that:

. . . it’s really important to think about how we use that engagement in a thoughtful way instead of always having, kind of people who, whose English is not so great doing a lot of the free labour and not getting the voices. I think this is really important, not just for the parents but for the kids. Because you see those hierarchies reproduced often in student government and student representation. Those parents who are very active in the school often have kids who have different access to opportunities within the school, are chosen for kind of gifted and talented kind of opportunities, are more chosen for student government, are more tapped on the back for other opportunities.

Calling attention to the inequalities of participation for both parents and students, Tamson explicitly names the hierarchies of participation and divisions of labour that can occur. In her experience, parents ‘whose English is not so great’ are relegated to ‘helping’ jobs (i.e. ‘free labour’) rather than representative roles, and she sees these racial hierarchies reproduced in student government and representation.

This stood in contrast, however, to Katie, who saw ‘school canteen volunteer work’ (presumably the kind of ‘free labour’ Tamson is referring to above) as a ‘good way of engaging’ parents from ‘Middle Eastern cultures’, because of the ‘simple’ English language skills needed.

As these reflections suggest, parents’ interpretations of ‘participation’ and ‘engagement’ in schooling can be highly racialised. This accords with Honig’s articulation of public things as essentially racialised in the ways they are experienced and controlled. Ahmed’s attention to how affect produces (and is produced by) boundaries between `us’ and `them’ is also illustrative here. While membership of the public thing might be formally `equal’, an attention to its spatial and material dimensions, including how they are experienced, swiftly exposes considerable asymmetries. Significantly, in distinction from other parents across the focus groups, Tamson expressed concern about the racialised impacts of gentrification, inequality of housing markets and consequently what she felt was the homogenisation of her local community. ‘I know I sound a little nostalgic,’ she said, ‘but it’s hard sometimes, because with that I feel like people who are a big part of the community often get pushed out.’ Tamson went on:

It becomes more homogeneous and there’s less kind of mix in the community. And then it’s harder and harder, I think, to kind of feel, feel like the school represents the actual kind of makeup of Australia or even Victoria. You know, like it, it looks very different than the community itself should look.

Here, Tamson connects her care and concern for her child’s school to a wider ideal: that the publicness of schooling ought to reflect and cohere the diversity of the broader society.

In the focus group discussions, however, most participants used a range of rhetorical strategies of distancing and displacement to express anxieties about the makeup of ‘their community’. For instance, reference to ‘demographics’ peppered our focus groups as a euphemism to describe changing communities and to navigate value-ladened concerns surrounding whose values and influence they considered desirable in the school community. We see these narrations as centrally concerned with constructing the boundaries around the value, worth and character of the publicness of schooling, signalling who and what should be included and excluded. Take the reflections of Maria, for example. When asked about whether parents should play an active role in the shaping of school decisions, Maria said:

. . . it feels like a double-edged sword a little bit, because I think it, to a degree, it kind of depends on, without sounding horrendously awful, but it does kind of depend on the culture of the school. And I guess also the demographics associated.

Maria went on to associate listening to parents and taking account of their views as potentially positive when she said: ‘when you’re listening to parents, and you’re putting things in place you want it to be for the betterment of the school and the students’. However, Maria also connected potentially negative consequences such as ‘less homework’, reduced school hours, and a lack of engagement with education, with what she referred to as potential risks of the school listening to parents from particular ‘demographics’. While never specifying exactly who she was referring to, Maria’s comments expose the invariable antagonism in the expressions of care and concern that characterise the affective relations of schooling. As a ‘holding environment’, schools necessarily evoke feelings about worthy and unworthy, right and wrong, forms of care and concern. Those feelings circulate between the school and people, intensify, and in doing so ‘create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds’, to use Ahmed’s expression (2004, p. 117).

For some, the term ‘demographics’ was used more explicitly in reference to cultural diversity, which some mothers cast as ‘Other’. Here, racialised and classed judgements arose about the ‘wrong’ kind of parental values, views and consequent influences on the school alongside a concern that ‘wrong’ influences could disrupt their desires for common or shared values in the school community. For instance, Sophie said:

I live in a town that used to be a regional town and is now a Melbourne suburb and it’s just getting bigger and bigger each year. Lots of different nationalities coming into the area, so the demographic is totally changing. I’m not really sure that the community knows what their values are. I mean, I like the values of the school, but I’m not sure that they really reflect what the community values are.

Similarly, Marnie reflected on local dynamics of school marketisation, where ‘local’ enrolment in private schools was seen to create greater cultural diversity from ‘out of area’ enrolments in the local government school:

Also, with the demographics when you’re talking about values in my particular district, we’ve got several private schools, and the people who have a likeness in values . . . have all sent their children to those private schools where they know that they’re going to be in an environment where they’re with like-minded people. The same values, religion sometimes culture. Now in our school, and I didn’t find out until two years ago, that a majority of our kids come from outside our feeder schools and district. Because of that, which means we do have a lot of new arrivals, a lot of recent migrants. So, it’s a learning for a lot of the others, it’s a really big learning curve.

Here, the government school is depicted as having a misalignment in values and culture, caused by the private schooling market which had provided choices for ‘like-minded people’.

In Marnie’s comments, we can read evidence of ‘white flight’ (Ho, 2011) where ‘people who have a likeness in values’ (and who can afford it) in Marnie’s community have sought private schooling, while racialised ‘Others’ from ‘outside’ the district – ‘new arrivals’ and ‘recent migrants’ – are concentrated in the local government school. For Marnie, then, ‘changing demographics’ signals a change in her understanding of the school community, and the kinds of affective relations that this community might have towards schooling. For her, attachment to the school is shaped by the intensified marketisation of schooling and the flow-on effects of this for schooling communities whereby the local government school’s taken-for-granted naturalised (white/Anglo) common is seen to have been displaced by the presence of racialised Others. Marnie’s reflections highlight how affective attachments to public things are always constructed in relationship to broader ideals surrounding who and what the ‘public’ is, and how it ought to be organised and coordinated. Moreover, her experiences highlight how in a (highly racialised) marketised field such affective attachments are formed in judgement and awareness of, and even yearning for, multiple other public things.

Ultimately, euphemisms of ‘diversity’ or ‘demographics’ centred on the potential influence of ‘Other’ parents on the public character of the school. This can be understood as a concern with who gets a say in contouring the boundaries, norms and spaces of the schooling public. Reflecting that she doesn’t ‘really have a good feel for what the values are in our community’, Fiona for instance lamented a perceived absence of values among undesirable families, stating that, ‘if the behaviour at pick up time is any indication they don’t have any values’. Other times, as with Maria, concern focused on the ‘wrong’ kinds of influences in the school. Maria suggested that the school ‘really needs to listen to the values of its community’ but that also, ‘in saying that, depending on various areas of the school, or where they are, I worry that they could be interpreted incorrectly’. Like ‘demographics’, ‘diversity’ emerged as an important term to denote the problematics of cultivating the shared public space of schooling. For instance, Marnie viewed diversity as something that was increasing and that ‘not everybody is equipped to deal with’. For her, this diversity was aligned with the wrong kinds of engagement:

A good example was we had a parent come up to the office one day for a consultation and every second word was ‘F’. . . . How do you explain to a parent who thinks that using that type of language, that is their core values? Using the F word in every second word. That is not the norm, so it becomes very difficult when you’re looking at values.

Thus, for Marnie, ‘diversity’ was understood as a marker for unacceptable and deficient parental participation within the school.

In these examples, care and concern for the school is about the kinds of parents, and therefore the kinds of values, that might influence it. The affective relations that circulate through the school articulated by these mothers, therefore, also produce normative and at times moralised judgements about what makes a ‘good’ public and who makes a ‘good’ citizen in this public. For the majority of these white/Anglo parent participants, whiteness was normalised as the frame by which their values and practices are recognised as universally ‘good’, while diversity and demographics were used to express concerns about ‘wrong’ and undesirable forms of engagement and participation in the school, reflecting parents’ displaced racial anxieties. In making sense of the ways in which the affective attachments to schooling can also involve the production of normative boundaries around what constitutes ‘good’ public activity, we are reminded of Ahmed’s (2004) reflections that emotions such as fear and anxiety are induced in proximity to a threat of difference, or what she calls ‘a threat to the object of love’ (p. 117). In many of these expressions, articulating care and concern for a community of shared values can result in a ‘turning away’ and distancing from ‘the Other’ at the same time as a securing of a comfortable sense of ‘self’. Significant concern, for instance, was expressed around perceived undesirable influences on the school, with the implicit – and sometimes explicit – outcome of this being an aspiration to control who does, and who does not get, to have a say within that space. Yet, in reading the articulations of values, control and alignment as signs of affect that circulate and shape those boundaries, we see that schooling inevitably imbricates parents in complex sets of affective relations that call forth a search for collective and relational meanings and practices. While their desires might be racially bounded, parents are nonetheless always invariably and constitutively entangled in affective relations that constitute the school as public thing.

Conclusion

In this article, we have sought to develop a conceptual and empirical understanding of schools, as public things, serving as vehicles for the expression, deliberation and contestation of the affective relations of care and concern for ‘the public’. To do so, we have explored parental attachments to and engagements with schools as expressions of care and concern for public things. We are interested in how a conceptualisation of school as a public thing renders anew parent and caregivers’ relations of care and concern with their children’s schools. With Honig, we conceive of ‘care and concern’ not as affirmative or normative ideals, but rather as ‘affective, relational environments’ made possible by the public thingness of the school (2017, p. 46). With Ahmed (2004), we see these affective relations as invariably shaped by understandings (and boundaries) of self, Other, us, them, and the feelings of comfort, discomfort, intelligibility and incommensurability that come with the formation of community and collective attachments – in this case in relation to schools.

In this article, we read the 22 predominantly white mothers’ focus group discussions of values and engagement as signs of affect that circulate and shape their embodied relationships to (and meanings attached to) school, community, family, and even ‘the public’. We looked for how relational attachments and affective relations of care and concern circulate through the object of the school, shaping boundaries between self and Other, and experiences of community and public space. These affective circuitries constitute the relations of care and concern that Honig suggests makes things public. Public things shape our capacity to care for the world, have power to mediate and enable relations between people and objects, and underpin our collective capacities to imagine, build and tend to a common world collaboratively (Honig, 2017 p. 38). In extending Honig’s theorisation of public things to schools, we have examined how parents’ reflections about their children’s schools speak to Honig’s broad claim that communities cultivate public things through their use of such things, at the same time as the things themselves shape the communities that care for them. In doing so, this article contributes a theorisation of schooling that, through the lens of public things, is attentive to the affective relational politics that make schools part of the ‘fabric of democracy’, the public venues through which we contest and care for the world.

Through our analysis, we identified two broad themes. First, we identified these predominantly white mothers’ desires for an alignment between themselves and the school, articulated as seeing oneself reflected in the values of the school and community. Participants in our focus groups expressed desires for belonging, recognition, empowerment, and reflected feelings of frustration and discontent when those desires were thwarted or ignored. Second, we argued that these mothers’ affective relations with schooling were generally expressed in ways that involved demarcating ‘self’ and ‘Other’. The participants across the focus groups ultimately normalised whiteness as the unspoken frame and location from which they spoke, voicing their racialised concerns through proxies such as ‘demographics’ and ‘diversity’. They positioned themselves as bearing witness to ‘diversity’ and changing ‘demographics’ – euphemisms for racialised and classed difference – while their own white, racialised position was normalised by largely going unsaid and remaining invisible (see Edgeworth, 2015), which is reflective of the broader structuring force of whiteness in Australian society (Sriprakash et al., 2022). These racialised concerns revolved around expressing the potential risks of ‘Other’ communities attaching to the school, and highlight some of the ways that the circulation of affective concerns about ‘wrong’ or ‘lacking’ values involves a surfacing of self and ‘Other’.

Yet, while our analysis highlights recognised phenomena in sociological research such as segregation, white flight and racial displacement, in this article we took up Honig’s argument that ‘When we think from the angle of public things’ we are more moved to ask not ‘who are we?’ but ‘what needs our care and concern?’ (2017, p. 28). We showed how conceiving of schools as public things – sites of attachment and meaning – allows a refocusing of analytic attention, illuminating the power of public things to collect us together, bringing us into relations with others in modes not always of our own choosing (Honig, 2017, p. 28). In this way, the lens of public things draws our attention to the ways that schooling imbricates parents in complex sets of affective relations that produce powerful collective and relational meanings and practices. At times, different forms of affective relations contribute to strengthening cultures of responsibility, such as when affluent parents navigate school markets seeking a likeness of values, and use school spaces to police or admonish undesirable conduct measured by highly normative moral standards. At the same time however, by staging their care and concern through the school-as-public-thing, parents might ‘extend, express and test’ their deepest commitments in agonistic relations with others (Honig, 2017, p. 55). Our analysis in this article illustrates how schooling imbricates parents in relational and mutually constitutive affective environments that speak to the collective power of public things.