Securitization, Youth, and Urban Public Schooling

• In Event: Security, Democracy, and Learning: Exploring the Dialectics of In/Security in Educational Space

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research in one low-income urban community and public high school in Chicago. It examines two questions: (1) How is security imagined, practiced, and lived under conditions of advanced neoliberal governance in urban and educational contexts?; (2) How do youth understand and experience security in their own lives? Building on research in urban political economy and critical geography, governmentality studies, and critical criminology the paper develops a notion of security under conditions of neoliberal urbanism. It argues that security has broadly shifted in meaning from a solidaristic distribution of risk under the Keynesian welfare state to a process of securitization defined by the erosion and fragmentation of the social under conditions of market governance and the simultaneous extension of state security as a means of containing social dispossession and alienation. I argue that securitization is representative of a crisis of social reproduction for public educational institutions and youth at the margins of the new urban geography—i.e. a crisis in those “historically contingent processes by which we reproduce the conditions and relations of economic and social security” (Feldman, Giesler, Menon, 2011, p.2). These processes are investigated through a critical ethnographic examination of one public high school and community on Chicago’s south side that included analysis of city and neighborhood data, educational policy analysis, participant observation, and interviews with teachers, youth, and other youth workers. Out of this analysis emerges several key findings. First, amidst the current economic crisis and the turn to austerity, privatization, and market-based solutions to educational governance in the urban sphere, public schools that serve low-income and racialized communities are being systematically divested of the resources needed to provide substantive forms of security for youth—i.e. safe and well resourced learning environments, engaging curriculum, and services for child development and mental health. Second, under these conditions, public schools are ceding more of their disciplinary authority to law enforcement which translates into prioritizing the containment of disorder over counseling and rehabilitating youth leading to new experiences marginalization and alienation. Lastly, while most youth view education as central to their long-term security, many have become skeptical of the idea that there is a path available to them via educational achievement which could lift them out of their current situation. Many youth recognize that whether due to their race and class or to broader social processes they are denied the same opportunities afforded to their more affluent counterparts. This has produced a complex set of positions in which youth imagine their own security. For some youth it has meant enhanced commitments toward college and career, for others a turn toward other outlets such as the military, gangs, or simply to indifference, while for others it has inspired a turn to activism and the desire to make a change in their community and city.
Feldman, S. Geisler, C. & Menon, G. 2011. Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life. Athens: University of Georgia Press

Author

• Alexander James Means, University of Toronto