Delinquency as Labor

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: 16.061-3 - Child Protection? Engaging the Politics of Childhood in a Carceral Landscape

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Examining how value and difference are rooted in the historical and lived experiences of young people narrated as “delinquent” and “deviant,” “trouble” and “troubled,” this paper considers the implications of understanding certain students as being “unproductive,” which is central to deficit subject positions in schools. If “productive” labor value cannot be drawn from (or developed in) young people who are labeled as “slackers” or “distractions,” how might they come to embody immaterial and material value, as symbol and surplus (Gilmore, 2007)? This paper considers how these deficit subject positions might require young people to perform immaterial and material forms of labor as “delinquents”?

My theoretical framework combines education, critical youth studies, critical criminology, and women of color feminisms to think through how certain young people are produced as “trouble/d,” “existentially surplus,” (Hong, 2012), and the “unvalue” against which “value” is defined (Cacho, 2012). Centering an analysis that considers age with other important identity formations offers a compelling lens through which to consider belongingness in the education system. Considering how the “child” is made to embody the “citizen as an ideal” (Edelman, 2004, p. 11) and “frames transactions within the US carceral sphere” (Meiners, 2015, p. 2), I emphasize the differential and racialized productions of adultness or youthfulness on young bodies to engage schooling’s relationships with non/belonging, innocence and criminality, and recuperability.

Methods and Data Sources
Methodologically, my research design engages: (a) the enduring narratives placed on young bodies; (b) young peoples’ experiences of structural violence within schools; and (c) what students’ insights reveal about alternative imaginaries. To explore the complexity of how different figures of “student” operate in the lived experiences of young people and schools, student writing and interviews constitute the core text of the study across three semesters—two in 2012-13 and one in 2014-2015 for a total of 93 students across six classes. The continuation high school classes were chosen based on the core curriculum’s focus on the education system; in each class we “read the logic of the metaphor[s]” (Spivak, 2003, p. 71) of young people and sought to denaturalize and interrogate dominant notions or figures of “student,” “youth,” “at-risk,” and “criminal.”

Results and Significance
Understanding delinquency as labor—to provide the unvalue within the “meritocratic” hierarchy—challenges how we understand the relationship between schools and prisons, as not only pushing certain young people toward incarceration through disciplinary policies but how schools require certain young people to “do time.” This lens also compels us to consider how the structural violence of schooling is iterative and everyday, rather than solely experienced in the moment of being pushed out of school or thrown out of class.

Author

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