Moving Beyond the Body Counts: Field Noting the Permanence of Anti-Black Racism in Education

• In Event: 66.016 - Resisting Regressive Notions of Opportunity: Participatory Scholarship in Action

Abstract

Intensified federal and private support of interlinking public education with other public institutions (Wacquant, 2001) have constructed a reality in which students and educators are fighting hard for their social survivance (Vizenor, 2008). For more than 50 years one the most prolific inter-institutional enmeshment in education has been the school-to-prison pipeline (hereafter “the pipeline”): state-sanctioned criminal justice-driven sets of policies and practices that reinforce anti-Black racism in the United States and that also have chronically stunted the growth of Black liberation movements (Sojoyner, 2013). Scholars, both alarmed and guided by the severely anti-Black racist control over educational opportunities and attainment the pipeline has enacted, have built a noteworthy but nonetheless hegemonizing knowledge base that frames the pipeline as a set of mutually informing policies and practices that center on racialized individual (mis)behavior.

While the widespread use of disproportionately high suspension, expulsion, and police arrest rates among Black, other non-white, low income and gender nonconforming youth has added “the pipeline” to the public lexicon, much less has said scholarship done to epistemologically challenge its historical roots in what Sojoyner has called “the systemic enclosure of Black freedom” (p. 242). The presenter argues that less academic energy has dripped into investigating institutional (mis)behavior and the extent to which these interlocked institutions are permanently rearranging the communities they disproportionately impact; physically and socially. For scholarship to be turning knowledge into social change-centered action, the physical and ideological terrains of inter-institutional ethical conduct need to be included in inquiries of racialized conceptualizations of the pathways towards achieving equal educational opportunity.

By presenting data excerpts and analysis that focus on some of the physical, ideological, and ethical moves performed inside and outside the pipeline, the presenter positions her own researcher’s field notes as extended witness accounts to describe the productivity of spatialized verbal codes that legitimize “systems of meaning” around “specific genres of being human” and racialized hierarchies of “life unworthy of life” (Wynter, 2003). In addition, the presenter conceptualizes “embodied social listening” as an all-body-involving engagement with current structures and ideologies of anti-Black racism and how these mark and reshape human life. By practicing embodied social listening through the documentation of field notes, the presenter argues that education researchers can be alerted about more diversified ontologies of materially and discursively manifestations of anti-Black racism.

The presenter will exit this conversation with a few points for deliberation to further project the interconnections between embodied social listening, scholarship on educational opportunity, and research as political action against anti-Black racism.

Author

• Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts at Boston