LAUSR

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how neighborhood stakeholders invoked a school’s history in protesting the closure of local schools in two Philadelphia neighborhoods in 2013. By situating the protest of school closures within a theorization of the politics and production of place, this article illuminates the ways stakeholders’ defense of local schools was embedded in constructions of place identity, with implications for claims to belonging. Invoking a school’s history in protesting school closures rooted schools in place, expanding the framing of schools’ significance beyond the school district’s metrics for school closure and revealing ways that closure decisions reproduced historic place-based inequities. School closure decisions have broad implications for communities that extend beyond narrow considerations of school administration, implications that should be taken into account in school closure processes. I draw on video and transcription records of public meetings as well as subsequent interviews with neighborhood stakeholders.