"They don't even know what Vietnam is!": the production of space through hybrid place-making and performativity in an urban public elementary school

The politics of place has been overlooked as an area of study in the social sciences generally and especially within the field of educational policy. This study seeks to provide an opening toward further studies in this area that may allow us to more closely examine the lived experiences of those within schools and how policies may be appropriated within these spaces. Toward this end, this study examines hybrid place-making within the Vietnamese Language and Culture program at Pecan Springs Elementary School. In exploring the practices of a small vulnerable population, this study hopes to illuminate the ways in which subaltern groups may transgress pseudo-natural boundaries. Drawing from the work of Henri Lefebvre and Dwight Conquergood, this study employs analytic tools novel to the field of educational policy and leadership. In particular, this study employs Lefebvre’s three dimensional theory of spatial production and Conquergood’s terminals of performance to examine the everyday practices of hybrid place-making of those within a Vietnamese Language and Culture program. In doing so, it is hoped that new ways of knowing and understanding may be opened up and, ultimately, spaces where critical subjectivities may emerge where the treatment of difference is not an unreflective practice. This is integral to projects of radical democracy where we supplant the question of how to solve problems of difference with those that ask what problems difference might solve for us.