Teacher Strikes as Education : Examining the Political-Aesthetic Lessons of the West Virginia Teacher Strikes of 2018-2019

This book examines the experiences of West Virginia teachers on strike in 2018 and 2019.

This book examines the experiences of West Virginia teachers on strike in 2018 and 2019. Sara Hardman employs a political-aesthetic framework to assess the impact of the embodied, affective, and aesthetic dimension of the strikes, rather than the tangible outcome of the strikes (e.g. pay conditions or redundancies). She argues that the intangible outcomes of teacher strikes comprise a political-aesthetic education that expands the possibilities for how teachers can live within a neoliberal and patriarchal context. The book presents new research that brings together teachers’ written and spoken narratives, interviews with teacher participants, media stories, podcasts, videos, and images. Hardman argues that teachers performed counter-conduct against particular characteristics expected of them under neoliberalism and patriarchy and this experience led to an expansion of possibilities for how teachers live as educators and as persons, even without dismantling the governmentalities of neoliberalism and patriarchy. Drawing on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Yuriko Saito, Richard Shusterman, this book is for students and researchers interested in teacher strikes, social movements and activism in education.