After the Easy Hard: Institutional Grieving After the Gun Violence Death of a Student

• In Event: 1413 - Mental Health at the Intersection of the Criminal Justice and Education Systems

Abstract

Black adolescent boys growing up in systemically-neglected urban neighborhoods disproportionately experience the loss of peers to gun violence; however, this phenomenon and its social and educational impacts have been understudied. Neighborhood effects research has convincingly shown the relationship between local community violence and children’s academic performance as well as their long-term academic trajectories or aspirations, most dramatically for Black students. Using two years of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban high school for Black boys, this paper builds on that research by investigating the individual and institutional mechanisms that might lead to academic fluctuations and other social outcomes. By studying in depth the aftermath of one gun violence incident which took the life of a high school boy, I show the range of emotional, interactional, and relational processes that play out as his grieving friends and their teachers navigate the academic and social spaces of their high school. I use emotion work (Hochschild 1979), and the racialized and gendered feeling rules that guide emotional display, as a framework to analyze moments of conflict between students and adults – and even between adults – related to what grieving behaviors look like. I document the ways in which this can lead to the disciplining of students who break restrictive feeling rules, as well as supportive teacher-student relationships in which feeling rules are relaxed. Overall, I outline three stages of institutional responses to students’ grieving and focus particular attention on the consequences of enduring, yet often hidden, grief in the months and even years following a loss. Understanding the mechanisms that may explain differences in students’ response to, and recovery from, losses to gun violence will inform scholars, policy-makers, and educators seeking to understand sources of educational inequity and improve outcomes for Black boys. 

Author

• Nora Gross, University of Pennsylvania