Becoming a Survivor Scholar: the Troubled Teen Industry, Higher Education and Institutional Betrayal - CANCELLED

• In Event: Harming instead of Helping: Institutional Betrayal, Trauma and Total Institutions

Abstract

The recent emergence of Survivor Criminology, the trauma-informed study of crime and justice from the lived experiences of survivors, invites recognition of a new variety of survivor scholars. This paper contributes to survivor criminology using autoethnography to trace the author’s pathway from the troubled teen industry (TTI) through higher education, a journey fraught with institutional betrayal. Through the arduous process of a doctorate, the author’s identity as a scholar survivor was formed and supported not through higher education but despite it. At universities and affiliates the author encountered ongoing barriers that other marginalized students, convict criminologists, and crime survivors experience. This analysis suggests changes in higher education and the TTI that are needed to honor the lived experiences of survivors. Receptivity to the reality of institutional betrayal can help inform and amend practices as institutions take an active role in healing and take responsibility for their harms instead of continuing to silence survivors in the student, practitioner, and professor positions. This requires higher education to answer the call from the Center for Institutional Courage, to benefit the institutions that we research from as well as the ones researched.

Author

• Heather Mooney, From Prison Cells to PhD