“I Like Flowers, That’s My Thing”: Identity Formation in a Carceral-Figured World

• In Event: Isis’ Justice: Re-membering Incarcerated Youth and the Urgency of Abolition

Abstract

Objective:

Although there have been some efforts to better address the educational needs of incarcerated students, majority of whom are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous, far less is known about how youth who are incarcerated navigate living and learning in confinement and how it influences their sense of self. To better understand education in the carceral context and the learning needs of incarcerated students, we need more studies that foreground student learning experiences in context (Esmonde & Booker, 2016). To do so, we must leverage a just wholeness that both recognizes the temporal nature of carcerality and that in most cases it is one of many identities that youth who are incarcerated carry.

Perspectives and Framework:

While success in prison education is often measured by the number of degrees conferred, GED tests passed, and lowered recidivism rates (Castro & Brawn, 2017), these measures do not adequately capture the relationship between learning and identity development. Instead, I turn to sociocultural theories of learning that privilege more expansive and situated forms of knowing, sense-making, and identity development to study learning and learners in the carceral context, particularly among youth who attend juvenile court schools ( Nasir & Hand, 2006; Rogoff, 2003). In this paper, I analyze and conceptualize how incarcerated youth come to figure the world they inhabit while incarcerated and the various identities they navigate and adopt to not only survive, but thrive while in a state of unfreedom.

Methods, Data, and Substantiated Conclusions:

Drawing on data from a three year critical ethnographic study in a Midwest juvenile detention center, I explore Locke County Juvenile Detention Center (a pseudonym) as a figured world where youth are constantly positioned and repositioned as residents, students, “juvenile offenders,” and “criminals.” Using youth interview data and letters written by youth, I explore how youth ascribe meaning to themselves as students and learners and to the activity of learning given their vested experiences within a compulsory juvenile detention center imbued with historical, racial, class, and gendered oppression. Using the conceptual framework of figured worlds, I examine how youth come to “figure” who they are through the “worlds” that they inhabit and how they relate to others “within and outside of that world,” in time and across historical time, place, and social processes (Holland et al., 2001; Urrieta, 2007). Importantly, I highlight how youth refuse and resist being reduced to their law-violating behaviors and instead find creative ways to (re)member who they were, are, and aim to be in the future. Youth, in many ways, are already finding ways to recover a more just wholeness for themselves and others, modeling abolitionist futures for us all.

Author

• Julissa O. Muñiz, University of California - Los Angeles