This study takes Central Connecticut as a window into how racial capitalism, liberal multiculturalism, and social reproduction unfold in everyday practice. It begins from a central paradox: if Connecticut is the land of “liberal values,” why is it so ridden with inequity?
The project approaches that paradox not as hypocrisy or moral failure, but as a constitutive feature of the late liberal order. It argues that liberal multiculturalism is not merely an insufficient response to inequality but a technology of governance that manages difference in ways compatible with ongoing capitalist transformation. Similarly, race is not treated here as a stable descriptor of social difference but as a socio-spatial technology — a means by which capital reorganizes people and land, redistributing risk and opportunity as it reshapes itself. By tracing how valuation, property, taxation, and discourse interlock, this study shows how racial capitalism is continually reproduced through ordinary practices that present themselves as neutral, ethical, or even anti-racist.
Critics have long observed that the U.S. public school finance system is profoundly unequal. As federal support for education has declined, municipalities have become increasingly reliant on local property taxes to fund their schools. This decentralized model ensures that wealthier towns can maintain well-resourced schools while poorer, often urban and minoritized districts struggle to meet basic needs. Public debate tends to focus on the unequal distribution of property wealth — or “tax base” — that underpins these disparities. Far less attention is paid to how that distribution is produced and how it becomes naturalized as common sense.
Although municipal property valuations are technically set by state assessors, those valuations depend heavily on prior sale prices and on speculation about what “average buyers” will find desirable. Citizens, therefore, are not just affected by the school finance system — they are active participants in producing the “school finance assemblage” itself. Through their everyday decisions about buying, selling, and valuing property, they shape the distribution of property value that underlies public revenue. Liberal antiracist discourse plays a crucial role in this process: by translating structural inequality into questions of individual attitude and intent, it allows actors to disavow the material consequences of their choices while sustaining the very hierarchies they denounce. Far from external to capitalism, liberal multiculturalism functions as one of its adaptive tools — absorbing contradiction, converting it into moral language, and redeploying it to stabilize accumulation. These dynamics are especially visible in Greater Hartford, where some of the starkest disparities in school funding exist alongside deep attachments to liberal ideals.
Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork — including participant observation, interviews, cultural elicitations, audiovisual mapping, and media analysis — this study examines the everyday mechanics of the decentralized school finance system and explores how those mechanics shape the experience, reproduction, and contestation of inequality. The project unfolds in three parts:
If the so-called “private” real estate market is central to public school finance, how does it actually work? Most realtors will say property value is about “location,” but what makes some locations desirable and others not? While scholars have documented how poor, urban, and minoritized neighborhoods are devalued, far less is known about how those spaces become linked to racialized geographies and taxonomies of civic worth in the first place.
This part of the study draws on work in science and technology studies (STS) and linguistic anthropology to approach the market not as a neutral arena of exchange but as an artifact of communication — something constituted through the semiotic practices, interpretive frameworks, and shared assumptions that give property value meaning. It interrogates the everyday practices through which value is made: the differentiation, ranking, and comparison through which residents, homebuyers, and realtors assign worth to space and, in doing so, stabilize markets themselves. Race, in this framework, emerges as a socio-spatial technology — a dynamic set of classificatory practices that organize people and places into hierarchies of desirability, risk, and worth. These hierarchies are not incidental to the market; they are what allow capital to reorganize itself spatially, clearing the ground for new rounds of accumulation while appearing to merely “reflect” consumer preference.
Because value, place, and race are habitually naturalized as self-evident, the communicative processes that produce them often remain obscured. Liberal anti-racist sensibilities — such as prohibitions against overtly “discriminatory” language — can reinforce this invisibility by shifting attention away from structural effects and toward individual intentions. By tracing how actors talk about, assess, and act upon properties, this research reveals how markets are socially constructed and how those constructions anchor broader fiscal and educational inequalities.
Through participant observation with homebuyers and realtors, analysis of real estate listings, and in-depth interviews, Part I explores how individual choices and shared cultural logics coalesce into market valuations — decisions that ultimately shape municipal tax bases and the resources available to public schools.
Engagement in the real estate market does not simply affect individual property owners; it has cascading consequences for public school finance. Yet this connection is obscured beneath a dense institutional assemblage of laws, policies, and procedures governing assessment, taxation, and state aid. This part of the study maps the institutional terrain linking private market transactions to public revenue streams, showing how everyday acts of buying, selling, and valuing property become mechanisms through which public goods are structured and distributed.
By combining institutional mapping, process tracing, participant observation, and interviews — including attendance at public finance meetings and municipal hearings — this research demonstrates how “private” and “public” domains are mutually constitutive. It shows how decentralized fiscal structures enable inequalities to appear natural or inevitable even though they are sustained by ongoing social practices and policy choices. It also examines how liberal policy frameworks, framed in the language of fairness or inclusion, often entrench the very property–public boundaries that sustain unequal funding regimes, allowing the racialized distribution of tax base to persist under the banner of reform.
Debates about school finance inequality and real estate are particularly charged in Greater Hartford, where glaring disparities in school funding coexist with widespread commitments to liberal multicultural ideals. In principle, such commitments might suggest broad support for redistributive policies. In practice, those policies often require wealthier municipalities to accept higher property tax burdens — a deeply unpopular prospect in a state already known for high property taxes.
These competing pressures produce a volatile moral and political terrain in which ideologies of diversity and equality collide with anti-tax conservatism. But these collisions are themselves productive: they help stabilize the boundaries of civic responsibility and legitimate the unequal geographies that racial capitalism requires. Residents of property-wealthy suburbs frequently argue that they should not be held responsible for remedying inner-city poverty, insisting it is “unfair” to penalize them for problems they did not cause. Such arguments do more than express political preferences — they perform the ongoing work of racial capitalism by naturalizing socio-spatial separations as moral distinctions and by reproducing race as a technology that links civic belonging to property value.
Part III traces these debates across traditional and social media, public hearings, and municipal meetings, and through interviews with residents on all sides of the issue. It asks how people experience, interpret, and narrate school finance inequality, and how those narratives structure political action and resistance.
Grounded in historical materialism, science and technology studies, and material semiotics, this project speaks to fundamental questions about social differentiation, socioeconomic reproduction, and social ethics in the late liberal era. By examining how property valuation, school finance, and civic discourse intertwine, it illuminates the ordinary mechanisms through which inequality is produced, justified, and contested — and how those mechanisms might be reimagined.
Ultimately, this work seeks not only to deepen our understanding of public school finance but also to make visible the ordinary practices through which we continually reproduce — and might yet transform — our unequal social realities.
University of Pennsylvania's Inaugural Presidential Fellowship (2021-Present)
Brady Family Endowed Scholarship, UPenn GSE (2016-2020)
The Society for Economic Anthropology, Halperin Memorial Award (2019)
Center for Experimental Ethnography at Penn Summer Research Grant (2020)
UPenn Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Immigration Grant (2020)
UPenn Anthropology Department Field Funds, UPenn (2019)
UPenn Penn Museum Summer Field Funds, UPenn (2019)
UPenn GSE Summer Research Fellowship (2017-2019)
Balderston Scholarship, Anthro. Dept., Teachers College, Columbia (2015)
Along with two other graduate students and a group of high school students at John Bartram High School, I co-produced, directed, and edited this short film. "Be Brave" (2017) depicts how students and educators at a neighborhood high school in Philadelphia both experienced and resisted the challenges of under-resourcing. My dissertation project grew out of this community filmmaking project, which was sponsored by both Penn GSE Film's (UPenn) and the Philadelphia School District. out
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