Inscriptions of White Settler and Carceral Schooling Practices on Young People's Bodies

• 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

This paper is conceived as a response to the deadly consequences of our ongoing anti-black racist social milieu and the continuous historical trauma these create (Lebron et al., 2015) in the lives of targeted youth (i.e. Black, non-white, gender non-conforming). With a sample of the body maps that New York City high school students created to visually document stories that Black bodies hold about lived experiences with racialized schooling practices, the presenter positions the body of the child as an archive of lived expertise in the social, cultural, historical, economic, geographic, and political contexts in which it moves, grows, and lives (McKittrick, 2006).
Situated in a critical race theory epistemology (Crenshaw et al, 1995) and embodiment theory (Krieger, 2005), the presenter applies an ocular ethic framework (Moore & Casper, 2015) to ground a mixed-methods, youth-centered participatory action research (YPAR) study to name some of the effects that systemically unequal and racist schooling practices have on young people’s bodies. An occular ethic centers on the three following frames: Focus refers to the act of making visible marginalized bodies and focusing knowledge production on their embodied experiences, specifically with structural racism and unequal schooling practices, as an ethical and intellectual responsibility. Magnification & Visualization are reflected in ethnographic data collection methods that “reveal, resituate, and recuperate bodies in order to examine the broader contexts that shape and constrain them” (Moore & Casper, 2015, p. 17).
The body mapping method that youth co-researchers developed in this YPAR study aims to make visible some of the visceral, real and imagined, impacts of the current neoliberalized, punitive, and high stakes education regime. “Zooming in” with body maps into what the presenter calls the fabric of embodied schooling widens the scope of methods and critical analysis of silenced, intersectional layers of the raced, classed, and gendered body work young people participate in on a daily basis.

By focusing, magnifying and visualizing young people’s bodies as archives of lived expertise with anti-black racist schooling structures, the author illustrates how the young person’s body materiality, corporeality, physicality and morphology are intimately linked and shaped by adult political actors who act in the interest of maintaining the same conceptualizations of educational opportunity that also fortify White supremacist ideology of the carceral state.

Author

• Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts at Boston