Racialized Surveillance Ecologies, the School-to-Prison Nexus, and the Mobilization of Abolitionist Praxis

• In Event: Race, Place, and Power as Curriculum: Redefining Discourses, Communities, and Identities

Abstract

This paper examines the ecosystem of surveillance to which young people are subjected in a city largely populated by communities of color. The paper explores this ecology in relation to the “school to prison nexus” while particularly attentive to the presence of and use of police/School Resource Officers as permanent staff in schools. The paper further examines the formation of an organic public pedagogical space by youth and for youth that speaks to young people’s taking of responsibility for their own education. Termed Students Organizing for Unity and Liberation (SOUL), the space is a space of hope seeking to, in part, mobilize counter memories of surveillance associated with the exercise of state power and enacting counter-hegemonic and abolitionist praxis

Authors

• Ricardo D. Rosa, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Joao Rosa, Bridgewater State University