Freedom Dreaming in a State of Unfreedom: Teachings From Incarcerated Youth

• In Event: Petals of Blood, Fruits of Freedom: Sustaining Educational Lifeways for Abolition

Abstract

OBJECTIVES

Drawing on autoethnographic and critical ethnographic methods, this paper explores what I have come to learn about teaching and learning, carcerality, and abolition as a Black Latina educator, researcher, and abolitionist who over the course of three years had the opportunity to learn with and from incarcerated students. Importantly, I highlight the ways that incarcerated youth are creating and sustaining lifeways within the carceral context, spaces of collective and individual freedom dreaming.

By combining my own auto-ethnographic reflections and data from the larger critical ethnographic information set, my goal is to bridge the conversation between what it means to be a BIPOC researcher educator committed to an abolitionist praxis, and the possibilities that come with working with system-impacted youth so that together we can create spaces where we can freedom dream and resist the totalizing affects of the carceral state.

FRAMEWORK

Using an abolition feminism approach (Davis et al., 2022), I lean into the contradictions embedded in teaching and conducting research in carceral spaces while simultaneously working towards a future without prisons and jails. I acknowledge and continuously revisit these tensions as part of my own reflexive process, but I also see the power and possibility of learning with and from some of our most marginalized students and learners while they are in a state of unfreedom, away from the people they love and care for. As such, I explore questions of educational dignity (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014; Espinoza et al., 2020) and how youth, and sometimes educators, find ways to create dignity affirming learning environments that operate as third spaces (Gutierrez, 2011) within the carceral context.

METHODS & DATA

Using audio recordings, notes, and journal entries, recorded and written over the three years, I reflect on my experiences as an educational ethnographer who studied teaching and learning, race and racism, carcerality, and identity development in a Midwest juvenile detention center. I couple the auto-ethnographic data with other ethnographic data, including interview and focus group data, and student artifacts, to illustrate what I have learned and continue to learn about education and abolition from the youth themselves.

FINDINGS & SIGNIFICANCE

I crucially argue that incarcerated youth, sometimes with the support of carceral educators and practitioners, were creating and sustaining third spaces within the carceral context that fostered joy, creativity, and opportunities for youth to (re)author a more expansive sense of self. Although youth were in a state of unfreedom at the time of the study, youth resisted being reduced to their legal disposition and used the interviews as opportunities to (re)author themselves as students, learners, artists, gardeners, advocates, brothers, sisters, athletes, and so many other identities not often privileged or seen. These moments and experiences inform my pedagogical and epistemological approach to abolition feminism and the type of reseach I continue to do.

Author

• Julissa O. Muñiz, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author