Cartographies of Inequity: Mapping the Trajectories of Young Women of Color Through the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: 33.067 - The Search for Justice in Critical Race Spatial Analysis

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores Education Journey Mapping, a qualitative methodology used in research to capture education trajectories of young women of color through the School to Prison Pipeline. These Education Journey Maps complimented GIS maps to help students situated their personal stories within larger social processes, linking the individual to the institutional.

Conceptual Framework
This paper utilizes two branches of Critical Race Theory, FemCrit (Wing 2003) and DisCrit (Annamma, Connor & Ferri 2013) to center the voices of historically marginalized people in order to understand, not only ways hegemony is enacted and embodied but also ways students strive for dignity (Rios 2010).

Critical Race Spatial Analysis (Pacheco & Velez 2009) provides an opportunity to add a thoughtful qualitative approach to GIS mapping, which has historically been imagined as quantitative (Kwan & Knigge 2006). Moreover, it supports recognizing students as knowledge generators, capable of authoring their own stories and creating solutions to the inequities they face (Dennis 2006; Matsuda 1987).

Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources
The fundamental generator of meaning is the act of experiencing the world and others through our bodies and positioning; critical phenomenology is the strategy of inquiry (Merleau-Ponty 1962). I am interested in the ways bodies are raced, gendered and abled intersectionally; this study is racially gendered and abled phenomenological work.

Data were culled from a yearlong qualitative study in two juvenile incarceration settings, a lock down detention center and residential treatment center. The main data sources were Education Journey Maps, which were created and analyzed by 10 young women of color with disabilities between the ages of 13-20. In addition, 39 interviews with the young women and 105 classroom observations were secondary data. These data provided ways to document commonalities between the girls' education experiences but also to excavate the rich variation of each individual journey.

Results
Findings indicated that girls were able to use the Education Journey Maps to tell their stories and connect them to larger structures. The process of creating and analyzing maps lead girls to identify themes in the Pipeline of labeling, surveillance, and punishment, actions schools took against them. Simultaneously, they were able to recognize strategies of resilience, ways incarcerated girls were able to creatively maneuver within a system that was committing structural violence against them.

Scholarly Significance
The School to Prison Pipeline has garnered significant attention in the last five years (Kim, Losen & Hewitt 2010). Though statistics illustrate the overrepresentation of students of color with disabilities, we still know very little about the processes that give rise to the Pipeline (Ferguson 2001; Winn 2011). Education Journey Mapping provides an opportunity to highlight the consequential geographies in which historically marginalized students navigate their lives (Soja 2010). This qualitative methodology aligns with this year’s theme because it allows for a more expansive notion of justice; justice that acknowledges how space and social processes impact lives of the marginalized and how those marginalized students respond with savvy and ingenuity (Annamma 2013).

Author

• Subini Ancy Annamma, The University of Kansas