Daily Becomings: Ethnography of the Humane within an Inhumane System

• In Event: Between Constraints and Possibilities: Narratives of Agency and Hope in Surveilled Educational Spaces

Abstract

Within systems designed for surveillance and control, alternative pedagogical practices can emerge that prioritize care over compliance. This presentation draws from a fifteen-year collaborative research partnership (2005-2020) with alternative to incarceration programs serving court-involved youth to examine how educators, counselors, and staff demonstrated consistently humane pedagogical practices that attended to young people's wellbeing, often taking priority over testing requirements and institutional metrics. As one youth participant described it, “it's like they decide to care about us every day.”
Our intergenerational research team used ethnographic observation and multimodal collaborative research methods to document how adults in these settings adopted what Hansen (2011) terms a "cosmopolitan stance"—maintaining "reflective openness to the new" questions and circumstances that youth brought into programmatic spaces while sustaining "reflective loyalty to the known" contours of young people’s lives and applicable care-centered practice. This pedagogical approach stands in stark contrast to the punitive frameworks that typically characterize juvenile justice facilities, where news reports regularly detail abuse and mistreatment of mandated youth.
The modern American juvenile justice system emerged from 19th-century child welfare movements that sought to address "juvenile delinquency" through institutions like New York City's first House of Refuge. Their primary aims were to remove children from adult facilities, yet they maintained and in many ways cemented tropes of delinquency into modern discourse (Meiners, 2016; Platt, 1969). While contemporary critiques highlight the damage this system has inflicted on children and childhoods – and this is validated in studies of mistreatment and poor carceral conditions – our over-time research reveals spaces where care functions as an antidote (albeit temporary) to the pernicious effects of incarceration and surveillance. Care practices intersecting at just the right moment in a young person’s trajectory can also have lingering effects, which is also what we observed, as evident in the types of programming, counseling, and exmissions practices (internships, recommendations) that were developed and adopted in these programs.
Court-involved youth in our study served as "canaries in the coal mine," indicating how well—or poorly—our educational and social systems serve young people whose lives are bound by institutional oversight. Their experiences, entangled with those of the adults in various program roles, reveal the possibility for humane relationships within oppressive systems. This presentation draws from interviews, field notes, and youth produced media and argues that such care-centered pedagogical practices offer crucial insights for educators working within surveilled and controlled educational environments, demonstrating how respect and care can (and must) flourish even within systems designed for punishment and compliance.

Author

• Lalitha Vasudevan, Teachers College, Columbia University