Youth as Trouble/d: An Exploration of Violence, Representation, and Alterity

• In Event: Unsettling Ethics in the Curriculum: Research Praxis and Pedagogies

Abstract

Youth as Trouble/d is an outgrowth of an ethnographic study at a continuation high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. The paper explores the methodology of ‘tracing the figure’ (Spivak, 2008) to consider how constructs of youth as ‘trouble’ or ‘troubled’ accumulate and perpetuate deficit-based ideologies, particularly those deficit-frames that come to inform literature and policies concerned with ‘intervention’ and ‘violence.’ I argue that reading how young people, who are the targets of these ‘interventions,’ are ‘(trans)figured’, allows us to disrupt the mere replacement of one signifier with another. Instead, this methodology of tracing allows us to unearth the manners in which such a transfiguration, and its attendant policies and practices, constitute forms of accumulative and embodied violence (Das, 2007).

I argue that tracing the ‘figures’ of young people, here as ‘trouble’ or ‘troubled,’ highlights and challenges the logics that authorize violence within schools and society-at-large. I ask, how was and is the figure of the ‘failure’ or ‘trouble/d youth’ transfigured to institute an education system that created the school as a site of uneven and violent stratification (Das, 2007)? Further, how has the figuration of youth as ‘trouble/d’ or ‘damage-based’ (Tuck, 2009) authorized the relationship between schools and prisons? How might this relationship thus be understood as a carceral methodology of the state?

Constructs of value under neoliberalism frame ‘trouble’ and ‘troubled’ youth as individualized (Cacho, 2012), singular ‘events’ or narrativized ‘blanks,’ rather than as ‘strength oriented’ (Gonzalez, 2010) and ‘survival rich’ (Lugones, 2003). I employ notions of enfleshment, eventfulness, and ethical substance to explore how young people who are positioned as ‘deviant’ act as the substance on which education policies and the State demarcate ethical claims; how durative, everyday violence is masked through these narrations; and how such alterity might provide an ethical orientation or embodied theory that does not allow division between those who narrate ethical claims and those who are narrated upon (Povinelli, 2011).

Author

• Chrissy Anderson-Zavala, University of California - Santa Cruz