Safety Beyond Violence: Exploring Affect and Visuality in Thinking About School Safety for Black Girls

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: Urban Learning, Teaching and Research SIG Roundtable One (Table 19)

Abstract

The growing availability of footage vividly documenting violence against youth of color has contributed to renewed calls to understand and respond to the problem of safety in schools and society. However, our understanding of safety remains narrowly focused on the elimination of bullying and physical violence, ignoring the ways that youth understand and feel safe. Drawing on visual culture and critical affect studies, this paper calls for reconceptualizing safety to address how both affect and visuality inform understandings of safe spaces. I explore how five young Black women at a Philadelphia magnet school conceptualize safety in their school and beyond.

Author

• Laura Krystal Porterfield, Rutgers University - Newark
  Presenting Author