The politics of re-territorialisation: space, scale and teachers as a professional class

Susan L. Robertson

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Abstract

Using scale, space and territory as a conceptual frame, this article sets out to explore the changing social class relations for teachers as a result of restructuring along with the strategic implications for organized political struggles by teachers and traditional means of presenting their interests. It begins, first, with some brief comments on globalization and state restructuring and the consequences for the transformation of the teacher-state-social class relation. Considering the consequences for teachers’ work and for teachers as fraction of the middle class of the unfolding processes of restructuring within national states and the global economy, a central argument of this paper is that movements in scale upward, downward and outward involve changing social class relations for teachers as a result of pressures arising from the unfolding wave of restructuring on what the author have referred to as teachers’ class assets.