What Freedom and Whose? Young Writers Experiencing Incarceration on the Contradictions of Freedom

• In Event: Literacies of Liberation Through Writing, Poetry, and Counterstories

Abstract

This project builds on the foundations of critical literacy research by honoring and extending the knowledges of young people who have the most to gain from the “struggle to expand the possibilities of human life and freedom” (Giroux, 1987, p. 11). Every day, thousands of young people in the United States wake up in prison. They go to sleep in prison. They dream in prison. They read, write, and rhyme in prison. Here I argue that their complex and contested literacy practices afford powerful possibilities for our understanding of what freedom means to them – and for all of us. Findings focus on the contradictions of freedom and how these contradictions can inform our understanding of freedom, youth incarceration, and abolition.

Author

• Adam D. Musser, University of California - Davis