Bordering Schools: Racialized Precarious-Status Youth, Policy Gatekeeping, and Abolitionist Educational Futures

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Erased, Buried, and Precarious Accountings of U.S. Students' Racialized Experiences

Abstract

Through community-based interviews with racialized students living under precarious immigration status, this study reveals how Canadian schooling entwines racialization, border enforcement, and social exclusion. Guided by Butler’s vulnerability (2016), Walia’s border imperialism (2021), Maynard’s anti-Blackness (2017), and Gilmore’s abolitionist geography (2022), we show that legal precarity functions as state-imposed vulnerability, reshaping everyday school life. Students navigate this terrain with layered tactics—ambivalent participation, deliberate silence, and selective visibility—that expose schools as sites of both internalized and institutionalized bordering. Situating these practices within racial capitalism, we demonstrate how educational institutions actively reproduce marginality. Adopting an abolitionist lens, we envision post-border, care-centered futures that dismantle white-supremacist and colonial logics in education and policy.

Authors

• Arlo Kempf, University of Toronto - OISE

• Dennique Lavia, Justice for Children and Youth

• Xun Ril Li, University of Toronto - OISE