Space-Bodies-Discourses of the Everyday: A Weaving Together of the Multisited Working Grounds of Education Policy

• In Event: 52.066 - A Call for Critical Education Policy: Examining Injustice and Advancing Justice in Education

Abstract

This study leans on three critical claims that social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger (2005) makes about the intimate relationship between people’s bodies and their social environments: “(1) bodies tell stories about – and cannot be studied divorced from – the conditions of our existence; (2) bodies tell stories that often – but not always - match people’s stated accounts; and (3) bodies tell stories that people cannot, or will not tell, either because they are unable, forbidden, or choose not to tell” (p. 350).
In alignment with this standpoint, this paper weaves together different data types from a mixed method and youth participatory action research study in New York City that examined to what extent physical spaces in urban public high schools inform how young people explain their educational journeys. To frame this direct link between learning environment and self, or space and body, youth co-researchers created (10) personalized lifeworlds (Horton & Kraftl, 2006) of the securitized physical spaces of their public high schools; designed (10) mental maps of their bodies to examine real and imagined physical and emotional injuries caused by their schooling conditions and environments; and collected (117) personal survey narratives from their high school peers about the daily social isolation that young people increasingly experience under the current high stakes education regime in the form of testing, standardization, school closures, and ongoing investments in policing and security forces on school grounds.
The results of this student-led study feature a triumvirate of embodied dimensions of education policy – body, space, and lived discourse; however, these are rarely acknowledged together, lest examined, when measuring the highly uneven impact privatization-promoting education policies have on the lives of students. In order to weld together social justice and education policy, this presentation concludes with a multi-sited framework that is closely aligned with the vision of the conference theme: doing justice work in education needs “to make room for democratized knowledge and knowledge production in which the experiences of all people are shaped by principles and practices of justice.”

Author

• Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts at Boston