Humanizing Schooling: Reimagining Violence Through a Comparison of School Culture at Two Urban High Schools

• In Event: 69.057 - Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: 69.057-6 - Justice and the Justice System?

Abstract

This ethnographic study compared two urban high schools within the same district, one perceived as failing and the other as successful, to examine Racialized Institutional School Violence (RISV). Relying on observations, artifacts, and semi-structured interviews, this study examined how RISV manifests, and how individuals in the system experience it. This paper integrated, Fanon’s notion of “zone of being and zone of non-being”, with Anzaldua’s borderlands, and school culture by attending to positionality, consciousness, and space. Data was analyzed inductively and deductively. Findings revealed there was within and between school stratification that resulted in displacement and or privileging of students and teachers. Data also revealed activism and solidarity as methods to confront displacement that stemmed from RISV.

Author

• Yanira Madrigal-Garcia, University of California - Davis