Re-imagining school reform and movement making through a feminist politic of resistance and digital storytelling

This dissertation grapples with dominant ideas of school reform and social movement making. I argue that school reform efforts that remain within the discursive and institutional domains of schooling often reproduce social inequities. This qualitative case study focuses on Adelante, a collaborative effort among researchers, teachers, community leaders, and first generation Latino parents, who collectively worked to resist deficit discourses, imagine community and student success, and mobilize community members and district personnel to make the schools and community more responsive to the needs of the most disadvantaged students. This study extends beyond a tracing of modernist conceptualizations of resistance that define social change as occurring through organizing oppositional forces against institutional bodies and people in power, to explore the ways in which Adelante collectively produced a feminist politic of resistance. This politic rested in the inevitability of failure based on a masculinist definition of success and turned toward non-modern knowledges and practices as the ethos from which to organize. This analytic frame attends to the perceived failures, productive tensions and disquieted affect of the organizations' history of formation, the process of digital storytelling, the anthology produced, and the quieter movements of social change.