Dismantle the Warehouse: Statecraft, Valuation, and Alternative Schools

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 9:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Antiracist Education, Policies, and Decolonization (Table 6)

Abstract

This paper examines the logistics of the burgeoning alternative schooling system in the U.S. and the state management of youth populations through value-laden labels like “at-risk,” arguing not for their reform, but their dismantling as institutions of state violence. This ethnographic research proceeds alongside Latinx youth attending an alternative school in the East End Barrio of Houston, Texas, considering the ways neoliberal logics, deficit and racist constructions of youth, and criminality are concomitant with the organized abandonment of racialized youth cataloged as less valuable. Alternative schooling not only exacerbates inequity, they are also a critical technology through which the state disciplines and abandons racialized, criminalized, and marginalized youth populations.

Author

• Hilario Lomeli, Vanderbilt University