Reconfiguring the spatial politics of education: Counter-hegemony and teacher organizing in Chicago

This article examines the 2019 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike as a spatial counter-hegemonic project that reconfigures the relationship between education, urban governance, and public infrastructure. Building on Antonio Gramsci's concept of counter-hegemony and its recent spatial reinterpretations, I analyze how CTU used the strategy of bargaining for the common good not only to expand the scope of labor demands, but to contest the fiscal, racial, and spatial logics of neoliberal urban development in Chicago. Drawing on participant observation, content analysis, and case study methods, I trace how the strike's protest routes, coalition-building, popular education, and creative practices worked across scale to produce an alternative spatial imaginary rooted in care, redistribution, and collective life. While the strike did not achieve all its demands and was met with both internal tensions and external resistance, I argue that its significance lies in the everyday practices and solidarities through which educators asserted a different vision of what schools, and cities, can be. This case contributes to scholarship on teacher unionism, labor geography, and urban social movements by foregrounding space as a key terrain of both constraint and possibility in counter-hegemonic struggle.