Abolitionist Methodologies and Imaginaries of Education

• In Event: Abolitionist Methodologies

Abstract

Abolitionist Methodologies and Imaginaries of Education considers abolition as a site of critical methodological, pedagogical and pedagogical practice, including inquiry that denaturalizes schools as sites of containment and “enclosure” (Sojoyner, 2016). Prison abolitionist scholarship, even that which is not explicitly concerned with schools, engages and rejects the underlying ideological and historical roots that permit certain people to be commonly accepted as disposable. This paper argues that abolitionist scholarship is informed by: (1) methods of reading and imaginings into (and against) institutions like schools, including tracing the roots and tentacles of the institutions (Foucault, 1977); (2) unsettling the “common sense” on which these institutions are founded and thrive (Meiners, 2016); (3) cultivating an imagination that is beyond unlearning to what we might learn and create; and (4) organizing and persistence—rejecting and challenging traces and buttresses of the carceral state in schools.

Abolitionist imaginaries of education reject the American myth of schooling that is invested in the disposability of young people, reflected in the “carceral-cultural” policies and practices, including the material classifications and figurations of “student” (Rodríguez, 2010). Abolition offers a way to proceed that challenges us to critique, reimagine, and leverage schools as sites of liberation or, at least, contestation by:
• Tracing the ideological, historical, and material interests in the disposability of young people;
• Asking how schools operate within the broader ecosystem of carceral control, including collusion with the policing, surveillance, and imprisonment of young people;
• Identifying the practices and policies that treat young people as disposable;
• Unlearning stories about the state’s relationship to safety and violence; and
• Enacting practices that resist collaboration with the state, as well as build toward schools as a site of freedom.
Drawing on a participatory ethnographic and archival research project, I consider the implications of abolition to research design and community engagement. I argue that abolition required an intimate reshaping and restructuring of my research design to be concerned with tracing lineages of deficit narratives and exclusionary educational policies in state and local archives, as well as troubling recuperative notions of “resistance.” By thinking together, the institutions of schooling and prisons through the lens of the PIC in its current and historical context, we are able to ask how these structures have been driven by racialized ideologies that center the pursuit of profit, and who benefits from ideologies that structure “delinquency” (Davis, 2003; Acland, 2018). We are further able to ask how the attendant schooling policies and practices, “ontologically disqualify increasing numbers of students of color who are produced through schools as undereducated, underemployable, and frequently ‘dangerous’ and in need of surveillance and containment” (Meiners citing Gilliam, 2007).

Author

• Chrissy Hernandez, California State University - Monterey Bay