From Workshops to Circles: How (Re)Design of Writing Spaces Shifts Meaning-Making in Youth Prisons

• In Event: 47.036 - Racial Logic(s) Under Surveillance in Educational Space

Abstract

Solving the problem of youth incarceration will require a radical reorganization of our social systems (along with many of our ontological positions) and is obviously beyond the scope of any one project. What this study will do is contribute to our understandings about how young people experience the situation of their incarceration so that their knowledge and experiential expertise become essential to the long work of prison abolition. This study will help us understand what young people in prison use writing for and what are the affordances of writing circles for their own learning as well as for the work of reorganizing society so that we can learn to deal with trauma and violence in healing and humanizing ways.

Author

• Adam Musser, University of California - Davis