"When I Walk Through School Gates I Want to Feel Free"

• In Event: Building the Radical Imaginary Now: Abolitionist Practices and Movements to End Our Carceral State

Abstract

Inspired by Angela Davis’ (2003) discussion of the ideological work that prisons perform in foreclosing our collective imaginations of alternative forms of addressing and transforming societal issues, this paper explores how young people engage abolitionist and anti-colonial imaginaries to name and challenge the carceral logics of the state within schools and communities. In this project “abolitionist imaginaries” refers to the abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex as an extension of the work of ending slavery in the United States, as well as the visioning that is required to imagine futures that would enable a world without prisons or a carceral state. I ask how young people re-imagine carceral logics of the state and force us to rethink safety, violence, and deficit frames of youth as “trouble” (threat) and “troubled” (at-risk). 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 in the San Francisco Bay Area 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, 2008, p. 35) of young people and sought to denaturalize and interrogate dominant notions or figures of “student,” “youth,” “at-risk,” and “criminal.” This paper employs a feminist theoretical framework of “enfleshment” and “eventfulness” to think through durative everyday violence, and how 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; Gordon, 2008).


References
Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete?. Seven Stories Press.
Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(2nd University of Minnesota Press ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Povinelli, E. A. (2011). Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
Spivak, G. C. (2008). Other Asias. Malden, MA : Oxford Blackwell Pub.

Author

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