Learning Obsolescence: Urban School Discipline in the Making and Management of Illiberal Subjects

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Policing Discipline and Disciplining Policies: Research Imperatives in the Carceral State

Abstract

This paper summarizes a study I conducted at a high-poverty, inner-city elementary school in a large urban school district in the Midwestern United States: a study of how punitive school discipline sorts and prepares inner-city students for illiberal governance in times of social insecurity and mass incarceration; a study of how they are treated as always already hopeless and are prepared for futures in which they are constructed as civically and economically obsolete.

Author

• Anne Kathrin Scheer, Southern Illinois University