Navigating Choice: School Buses as Racializing Infrastructure in Post‐Katrina New Orleans

ABSTRACT This article is part of the special issue, Racialization and The Gig Economy, Anthropology of Work Review 47 (1), June 2026, edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. This article explores the expansion of school busing systems in the aftermath of New Orleans' unprecedented conversion of all public schools to privately managed charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The charter system strikingly moved from neighborhood schools to schools of choice, forcing the primarily black and low‐income student body to commute twice as long to school across an increasingly fractured racial landscape. The article argues that the school bus and the students themselves have become racializing infrastructures and that the mobility labor of these students is both reflective of larger transformations in gig economies and, in its spatial and racial dimensions, has turned their access to schooling into a form of gig work. Like gig workers, students are increasingly forced to circulate between urban core and periphery in service of both their own entrepreneurial and economic ambitions but also in service of larger ideological projects of choice and a market model of society—movements with hidden social and economic costs and unjust burdens.