(Dys)regulation and the "Revolutionary Mindstate"

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Race and Education, K-12 Challenges

Abstract

Positioning kids’ displays of distress as communication about their metabolization of structural harm, I argue that a charter school network in Chicago uses restorative discipline practices in a way that systematically dislocates individual healing from systems transformation, by at once devaluing care work and rendering it operationally necessary. This process takes place through 1) reducing the visibility of students’ distress through classroom exclusion; and 2) devaluing the space and time of the care work that is aimed at reducing kids’ distress. Even as these schools use care as a vehicle for institutional stability, Black and queer educators translate students’ behavior that is often categorized and treated as individual pathology into strategies for collective transformation, nurturing the kids’ inclinations toward refusal and revolution that are externalized as rule-breaking and/or non-normative behavior. I operationalize Hartman’s (2020) care in excess to reveal the ways that race-conscious and queered forms of care extend beyond the labor necessitated by the institutional structure and create the conditions necessary for authentic coalitions.

Author

• Ana Vasan, University of Chicago