Carcerality, Coloniality, and the Police Dogs in Children’s Media, Curricula, and Educational Spaces

• In Event: K-16 Decolonial Possibilities in the Works

Abstract

Police remain a normalized and romanticized presence in schools, framed as altruistic and moral actors. At the same time, curricula present animals as servile tools to achieve human interests across young people’s lived curricula. In this paper, we look at police dog visits and representations of police dogs in children’s media to show the ways police dogs’ presence in schools, media, and curricula normalize and socialize children into the ideologies of settler colonial nation-states. Through a collaborative and thematic content analysis PAW Patrol and Dog Man alongside media reports of police dog visits to schools, we show the subtle and explicit ways that police dogs enact curricular violence permeate children’s socializations with pro-police messaging.

Authors

• Kyle L. Chong, Michigan State University

• Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University