Mapping the Biopolitics of School Dropout and Youth Resistance

• In Event: Youth Resistance Across Neoliberal Contexts

Abstract

This paper will put forth an introductory argument and evidence – original research, secondary and archival data – for school non-completion as a form of biopower, and school dropout to be considered a form of biopolitical youth resistance in the US.

Beginning with an overview of the empirical relationship of education to health – which is the most significant predictor of lifetime health, morbidity and mortality – and current graduation rates in the United States, the first section will intertwine these data to detail a framework of education as biopower. Education as biopower in today’s society is having direct effects on human development and population health disparities. The epidemiologic evidence presented reveal that what is now at stake in education is also the central claim of biopower: “…the ancient right to take life or let live is replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1978/1990, p. 138).

The two IRB-approved, youth participatory action research studies (Cammarota & Fine, 2008) presented in this paper investigate the embodiment of educational biopower and asks: As it is shaping entire populations of bodies, is it simultaneously being taken up inside individual bodies experiencing these regimes of power on a daily basis? What does such bodily evidence reveal for understanding resistance?

Drawing from focus group data and a qualitative mapping method called x-ray maps (Author1, 2011) of students ages 14-21 in New York City (n=22) and Baltimore (n=100*) public schools – two of the largest school districts and epicenters of the graduation rate crisis – this paper will present evidence for the ways in which schooling and education policy is embodied: how and where experiences in school are taken up by the body, for whom and with what consequences. Such an approach reveals what students’ bodies are resisting, why and how.

The findings presented in this are presented as data visualizations and provide evidence for education as biopower: as it acts to foster and disallow life. Findings reveal multiple dimensions and representations evidencing how students embody educational biopower: distributed across ≥17 places in their body, as stress, and as inextricably linked to health, happiness, and flourishing. Data reveal a variety of dimensions that are ‘felt’ in school and their originating educational policies and practices; and span a wide range of academic, counseling, social, developmental and health implications. This paper will discuss these findings as it relates to the theoretical construct of biopower.

The paper will end with introducing school dropout as a form of biopolitical youth resistance, which is part physio- or psychological response and involves a conscious, cognizant choice (active), subconscious need (embodied; vis-à-vis cumulative disengagement, manufactured apathy, stress, exclusion), or hybrid thereof, to leave school in an effort to preserve one’s humanity, elevate one’s self to a higher level of life and further away from death (physical, mental, spiritual, psychic, etc) in an act of critical resistance against educational injustice and miseducation.

Author

• Jessica Ruglis, McGill University