Schools as Terrains of Struggle: Re(Mapping) Youth of Color’s Navigational Practices

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Sites of Struggle, Resistance, and Power: Decolonizing Schools and Universities (Table 9)

Abstract

In order to physically and figuratively navigate their school, students must have a comprehensive understanding of its physical, social, and cultural landscape. Through evading surveillance, taking ownership of hallways, building alliances with teachers, and rejecting directives of punctuality, young people of color engage in various means of resistance and refusal while navigating this terrain. The everyday navigational practices, birthed and shared by and among racially marked youth, are central to this study’s inquiry. Through qualitative methods that center youths’ embodied relationship to space, this paper attempts to re-map student movement within school geographies to understand educational institutions through what McKittrick identifies as “sites of terrain of struggle” (2006).

Author

• Anisa Yudawanti, Stanford University