Infrastructures of dispossession: Analysing emergent policy approaches affecting working-class youth in South Africa

• In Event: Counter Hegemonic Struggles

Proposal

Recent developments in the education landscape in Western Cape Province, in South Africa include the deployment of school-based law enforcement officers modelled after the US school resource officer (SRO) programme, as well as recent provincial legislation empowering the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) to open ‘intervention facilities’ for the temporary displacement of students found guilty of serious misconduct. Such initiatives are also mirrored in broader social projects such as the mass deployment of community-based law enforcement officers within the law enforcement advancement (LEAP) programme.

This paper argues, drawing on Giroux’s concept of ‘disposability’ and Imogen Tyler’s reconceptualisation of stigma as a machine, that the new changes, alongside other developments such as the introduction of collaboration schools (or ‘public-private partnerships) and donor-funded schools, suggest a shift in the imagined futures of working-class youth and which furthermore risks establishing an infrastructure that may be leveraged for the dispossession of youth and for capitalist expansion.

This paper shows how ‘subalterns’ are systematically excluded in the processes of problem identification, policy formulation and programmatic design on matters which affect them. These young people are, in a sense, spoken for and spoken into being through the deployment of macro-discourses from an array of fields (psychology, criminology, social work, etc.) which seek to ‘know’ them. External political and economic forces both truncate their lives and attempt to predict their future. On this basis of having their lives surveilled and examined, legitimisation and license are given for others to “intervene” in their lives.

This paper also attempts to show within a bifurcated schooling system, in which the state appears to have neglected or withdrawn from a commitment to redress, mounting concerns about violence and safety at school are leveraged for the manufacture of consent, which renders new changes acceptable. Ironically, there exists a broad international literature, as well as organisational networks contesting the criminalisation of youth and the prison industrial complex, and so possibilities exist for learning through transnational activist collaboration.

Author

• Ashley Craig Visagie, University of Cape Town