Collective Embodied Abolitionist Disposition, Reflection, and Data Collection in Youth Carceral Facilities

• In Event: Abolitionist Experiments in Research: Enacting an Abolitionist Praxis in a National Study in Youth Prisons

Abstract

Objective/Purpose
Across the United States, youth carceral facilities, such as juvenile detention centers, prisons, and rehabilitation centers, continue to uphold carceral logics of confinement, control, and punishment. As part of Stanford’s Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice research team, we visited several carceral facilities in various U.S. cities (e.g., Phoenix, Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Honolulu). Drawing from first-hand experiences conducting interviews for the Walkout! Lab, our paper focuses on our shared data collection processes and experiences. Collectively, we provide insights on our embodied abolitionist dispositions and offer reflections relevant when planning, undertaking, and debriefing data collection phases within the restrictive state-sponsored youth carceral facilities. Ultimately, our paper offers reflexive insights regarding participation in research methods that involve direct engagement with and alongside multiply vulnerable populations. The purpose is to showcase how abolition and previous experiences shaped our data collection processes, mishaps, and relational engagements.

Theoretical framework
Our theoretical framing is rooted in critical race theory (Bell, 1992; Crenshaw et al., 1995), which foregrounds the centrality of race and racism in shaping social structures, experiences, and knowledge production. As Black or Latine researchers, we reflect on our own narratives to challenge dominant understandings of objectivity in research, disrupting normative assumptions about who conducts research and how. In doing so, we extend CRT’s commitment to counter-storytelling by using autoethnography and collective dialogue to surface the complexities of conducting research within systems of racialized punishment.

Methods/Modes of inquiry
We deploy a qualitative approach of critical race autoethnography (Camangian et al., 2023; Chávez, 2012), initially utilizing conversational kitchen-table dialogue (Lyiscott et al., 2021; Rocha et al., 2024) to formulate central themes across our collective insights, reflections, and observations prior to, during, and after the varying phases of data collection across cities. From there, we curate prompts to respond to, building from each one of our responses. Altogether, this method affords the opportunity for building generative insight on our collective embodied abolitionist scholarly and interpersonal disposition.

Data sources
Recordings and textual transcripts of kitchen-table conversations, observations, researcher notebooks, and collective writing prompts and activities.

Substantiated conclusions
Our reflections in this paper illustrate the power asymmetries embedded in data collection within carceral contexts and the deeply relational nature of conducting research in these spaces. These insights underscore the importance of reflexivity, care, and abolitionist commitments throughout the research process, especially when working in youth carceral facilities. Grounded in this approach, our personal and lived experiences, including our racial and gender identities, relationships to carceral systems, professional backgrounds, and shared abolitionist values, shaped how we moved through the research process and informed the connections we built with youth inside the facilities.

Scientific/Scholarly significance
This paper contributes to scholarly conversations on abolition, race, research, and methodology by examining how researchers of color navigate carceral space. Through critical race autoethnography, we highlight the significance of reflexivity, identity, and relationality in data collection with incarcerated youth. Our abolitionist experiment advances research approaches that center care, repair, and justice in spaces meant to dispossess and confine.

Authors

• Brianna Marche' Harvey, California State University - Fullerton

• Brian Cabral, University of Texas at Austin

• Michael O'Key, Stanford University