(Un)Seeing Danger: Examining Anti-Carceral Geographies Through PhotoVoice With Black Youth

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Place-Based Inquiries in Black Education

Abstract

The recent killings of unarmed Black people by police officers and the subsequent law enforcement clashes with communities of color has garnered renewed national attention. The video of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd while three colleagues stood by demonstrates how police tactics further Black killability and antiblack violence. Criticisms of policing extend to the officers who patrol K-12 school hallways. Between 2009 and 2018, there have been over 60 documented violent assaults on Black and Brown youth perpetrated by school police (Advancement Project, 2018), with many more brutal encounters going unnoticed and unreported. Despite the documented harm caused by school police, they remain a fixture in many schools, particularly those serving Black and Latinx communities.

While school police have had a longstanding presence in public schools, recent policy decisions have called for the termination of their contracts, along with the removal of school resource officers (SROs). Such calls present an urgent research opportunity to investigate how Black urban high school youth reimagine safety in schools and society. The removal of school police demonstrates an effort to disrupt antiblack carceral geographies that shape educational institutions. This study brings together conceptual tools from Black studies, Black geographies, and education to explores the Black educational spaces (Warren and Coles, 2020) that Black youth (re)make to further disrupt antiblack geographies in the wake of the termination of school police. The one-year case study (Stake, 2013) utilizing visual qualitative spatial methods (i.e., photovoice) in conjunction with focus groups (n= 20) of Black high school students to examine how they “make place” in and around their school campuses. Data analysis utilized constant comparative method (CCM) to develop concepts from the data by coding and analyzing simultaneously. Throughout data analysis, I used an iterative process to sort and order data into units of meanings, categories, patterns, and themes (Creswell & Poth 2016). This study has implications for how teachers and school leaders might (re)structure classrooms and school environments towards anti-carceral spatial arrangements that better support Black students' educational success.

Author

• DeMarcus A Jenkins, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author