Abolishing Carceral Geographies: Reclaiming Third Spaces in the Educational Lives of Incarcerated Young People

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
The destruction of young people’s third spaces defined as the inbetween – betwixt and liminal spaces (Soja, 1996) between the academic and home/community knowledge spaces – contribute directly to the carcerality of young people and their geographies. This presentation reinvigorates the role of third spaces to articulate incarcerated youth’s experiences not only by the violence they suffer, but also by calling attention to the radical place-making of incarcerated youth through their educational experiences. We examine this process conceptually and empirically through a process that honors the abolitionist promise of making educational ‘freedom as a place’ (Gilmore, 2008).
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Using Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2022) concept of abolition geography, which defines space as both the site and stake of struggle, this study examines how reclaiming and redesigning third spaces within & beyond youth detention centers can become acts of resistance against carceral logics. Abolition geography teaches us that freedom is not merely the absence of prisons but the presence of life-affirming infrastructures – what Gilmore calls “life in rehearsal.” This project posits third spaces as life-affirming infrastructures, and their restoration as essential to spatial justice and educational liberation.
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Education journey map (EJMs) methodology (Author, 2016) served as a process for disrupting carceral geographies and reconceptualizing young people’s spacemaking processes and their spatial knowledge. We focused on techniques and modalities of the youth people’s counter cartographies, to analyze the maps’ political, theoretical, ethical and methodological implications alongside artifact elicitation style interviews. This process reflected our commitment to honoring the art work of incarcerated youth as they expressed their spatial knowledge through attending to visual, auditory and textual storytelling techniques of the EJMs. This process led us to our conceptual reorientation of third spaces.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Although still in the analysis phase, three emergent key findings are: (1) the destruction of third spaces represents a spatial manifestation of systemic disposability and racialized punishment, (2) incarcerated young people articulate a clear and urgent vision for educational spaces that resist carceral logics and honor relational and creative knowledge-making, and (3) even within detention, young people engage in radical spatial imagining, processes for reconstructing third spaces through memory, art, and collective dialogue.
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
Our ongoing work necessitated a geographical attunement that allows us to reorient spatially to the young people’s experiences. This reorientation allows us to hone on spatial knowledges young people describe; providing us opportunities to join their articulations of the places they dream of, their resistance and abolitionist praxis. As a methodological shift, the conceptual contribution harnesses young people’s spatial knowledge as producing critical geographical theory that situates their educational experience sensemaking. Our abolitionist experiment contributes to ongoing conversations in educational research about the spatial dimensions of schooling, the carceral state, and abolitionist pedagogies. It advances the argument that educational justice for incarcerated young people is not only a curricular or disciplinary concern but a spatial one.

Authors

• Kaleb Germinaro, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Veronica Velez, Western Washington University

• Sophie D'Souza, Stanford University