Geosocial spaces of educational detention/transition

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Global migration: biopolitics, interruptions, and trends in theory and method

Proposal

This talk discusses the methodological approach for a case study on seven youth shelters, all licensed providers that are largely funded by the U.S. Department of Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement. These shelters serve as temporary detention centers with the aim of preparing the youth to transition into a sponsor’s care in the United States. All the youth shelters must provide 6 hours of educational service; for this they have on staff teachers that work alongside human service clinicians. One stated aim is to prepare unaccompanied youth for their transition into the US educational system. In order to better understand how the shelters are constructed as both educational places and passageways to somewhere else, I turn to Mitchell and Kallio’s (2016) work in human geography on transnational topologies. By focusing on the geosocial relations of actors--both unaccompanied youth and instructors-- the study explores how mobile/immobile subjects construct and are constructed within the shelter, and how the shelter is practiced and co-generated as both a space of arrest and transition to US schooling. What new transnational geographies of schooling are produced through the practices and relations of the shelter?

Author

• Jamie A. Kowalczyk, Concordia University, Chicago