Trapped Inside a Poisoned Maze: Mapping Young People’s Geographies of Disposability in Schools

• In Event: Reclaiming the Methodological Grounds of Neoliberal Education Policy Research

Abstract

In the United States, “bad” and underperforming schools struggle to survive fiscally under neo-liberal education reform efforts and an economy of high stakes testing. Disinvested schools operate under intensified surveillance technologies. These criminal justice-based safety and discipline practices, widely known as the school-to-prison pipeline (Wald & Losen, 2003), are manifestations of the “slow violence” of neo-liberal education reform as schools under surveillance face the possible threat of school closure (Aggarwal, Mayorga, & Nevel, 2012). The learning environment of targeted schools undergoes significant physical reconfigurations that further marginalize the bodies of those already thought to be racially and economically disposable.
This paper presents insights to what I call the “geographies of disposability” that can be found in some of New York City’s surveilled public high schools. Using this framework, I argue that the current socio-political contexts of school privatization and high stakes schooling economy exist simultaneously to the spatialization of abandonment and disinvestment in the lives of low-income, non-white, gender non-conforming, and immigrant youth. Moreover, this scaffolding of the social character of space production is pivotal for critically rethinking the “failing student” within a society that disposes young people whose bodies are indexed as socially undesirable for a homogenous consumer-driven society. The guiding theory of method for this paper is what Weis and Fine described as “critical bifocality” (2012). Critical bifocality focuses on developing standpoints of local expertise narratives that speak back to macrostructures from which to document, critique and resist localized hegemonies that are represented by policies.
Members of a New York City-based youth participatory action research project (YPAR) created mental maps to document their lived experiences with the uneven materialities of power relations in their surveilled school spaces. More specifically, these mental maps detail young people’s personalized “lifeworlds” (Horton & Kraftl, 2006) within each of their disinvested school spaces, and include daily individual race-, class-, and gender-specific journeys. Student maps display real and imagined educational injuries that neo-liberal education reforms cause in their individual lives. By braiding together materializations of educational policy and the visual narratives of young people who are “on the ground”, this study highlights the scientific contribution of mental mapping in education research; the detailing of local experiences and the structural arrangements instantiated by neo-liberal education policies in urban education.
When reframing the disproportionate use of school safety and discipline practices in under-resourced school communities as long-term inscriptions on physical space as well as on the bodies of students, it becomes clearer how “scientific” research informing education policy can have an enormous influence over what kind of society this country produces, what kind of habits and behaviors are rewarded, and the kinds of lives students are allowed to occupy in urban areas. Diversifying the epistemological grounds for inquiry committed to outlining the mortalities in our current public education’s geography means to disclose them fearlessly and to bear witness to young people’s ongoing struggle for survival in our cities.

Author

• Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts at Boston