A Reconfigured Panopticon: COVID-19, Virtual Schooling, and Regulation of Our Homes

The onset of the COVID-19 disrupted schools’ conventional architecture, making its once invisible infrastructure hyper-visible. Given the opportunity to reconfigure pervasive educational injustice amid school closures, the frenzy of a pandemic permitted the undercurrents of power to go unquestioned as educators contemplated how to move schooling into students’ homes. As a result, virtual schooling during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was conceived and operated through neoliberal logics of power. To preserve the structural, ideological, and reproductive function of schools, panoptic power surveilled people in their homes, raising concerns about antidemocratic practices of publicly regulating private spaces, especially for people of color. In this essay, we theorize a new articulation of the panopticon that emerged during virtual schooling by examining the experiences of mothers of color across greater Los Angeles during spring 2020. We first explore Foucault’s (1977) original theory of the panopticon as a tool to regulate and enforce institutional ideologues through an omnipresent gaze executed by myriad technologies. Then, we theorize how these technologies have become reconfigured during virtual schooling in the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, we delineate how novel forms of surveillance reformed private space, rearticulated people and their roles, and reconstituted value and misdistributed shame. Most worrisome, our research highlights how these emerging forces disproportionally function to exacerbate epistemological and ontological violence impacting the lives and educational experiences of children and families of color. Findings stem from a three-year ethnography about undergraduate students who were also parents studying education at a Hispanic-serving institution in Los Angeles. Thirteen mothers, all women of color, elected to continue participating in research during the onset of the pandemic. The authors conducted virtual observations and interviews were conducted while the mothers documented their virtual schooling experiences through photos, videos, and journaling. Recognizing that participants’ experiences were situated amid broader societal discourse, we also analyzed relevant news and social media posts that codified their realities. We argue that a nuanced understanding of how institutionalized power operates within and through schools is urgent and invite critical educationalists to further study this most current variant of Foucault’s panopticon. We raise critical questions that have largely gone unasked, and especially unanswered, since COVID-19 transformed educational landscapes, and turn to critical researchers and educators to further interrogate panoptic operations within the identified domains, to expose others, and to work toward liberation. Assuming an abolitionist lens, we argue that better understanding of this nuanced, institutionalized power permits purposeful dismantlement in pursuit of schools’ liberatory potential.