Home/School: Law, Governance, Futurity

Home and school are deeply interlinked concepts in US cultural and legal consciousness. Both are sites of education, subject formation, and moral and legal authority–and both are deeply imbricated in larger legal, political, and religious logics. This roundtable brings together four presentations that complicate settled notions of home and school, showing how these categories themselves are partially produced by layered dynamics of law and governance. Our work on home economics courses, Indian boarding schools, prison museums, and conservative Christian homeschooling reveals how homes and schools become legible as homes and schools in the ways they imagine and implement authority, exercise power, and manage the future. While all regionally focused on the United States, these presentations span historical contexts and probe different institutional forms as a way of exploring the home/school as a site linking religious-legal logics to on-the-ground relations of power.