Social Control Infrastructure and Pedagogies of Love: An Ethnography of a Black High School

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Fifteen
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Black Education Within and Outside of Schools (Table 10)

Abstract

Racialized social control in schools is a primary mechanism of educational inequity and therefore broader racial injustice in society. Schools that serve predominantly Black student bodies are disproportionately likely to rely on social control as the guiding value of the institution. That said, many educators, students, and other community members within these hyper-controlling schools strive to cultivate “love, justice, and joy” (Laura, 2014) in their school communities. This project uses ethnographic data to operationalize a ‘pedagogy of love’ and demonstrate how it disrupts social control infrastructure at one predominantly Black high school. This proposal highlights preliminary insights from an analysis from one ethnographic anecdote, which will be expanded in the full paper.

Authors

• Olivia Marcucci, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Tonya Wright Satchell, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author