The Social Disciplining of Voices and Bodies Into and out of Modernity

• In Event: 33.078 - Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: 33.078-11 - Social Stratification and Tracking Policy: Perverse, Persistent, Pervasive

Abstract

Motivated to retain the rewards of their own social locations by the prevailing scarcity of material resources produced by liberal political thought, actors within schools perform the work of social disciplining. That is, identifying and regulating groups and individuals into particular locations within social hierarchies. The classification processes that motivate specific assignments are based in the communicative practices of the body and voice, as indexical signs are read and acted upon as they point to what are interpreted as deserved social locations. While subjects may reject these interpellating calls, they do so from within the constraints and allowances of specific social and educational contexts. Within these contexts, the power relations of whiteness largely shape perceptions of rationality and thus, desert.

Author

• Theresa Burruel Stone, University of California - Berkeley