Conceptualizing Iris Young’s (1990) “Five Faces of Oppression” to protest violence in education against humans and animals

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Considering the CIES conference theme, “The Power of Protest” and united by Iris Young’s (1990) “Five Faces of Oppression,” our panel of three papers engages in a complicated conversation as a form of protest against violence in education. The five “faces” of oppression include exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Young identifies oppression as “structural, rather than the result of a few people’s choices or policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules” (1990, p. 56). It is important to note, however, that “... it is not possible to give one essential definition of oppression” (Young, 1990, p. 57); therefore, our panel highlights how different groups or individuals share a common condition in which abilities, capacities, needs, thoughts and feelings are restrained (Young, 1990). The underlying premise is that oppression in the field of education is systemic in nature and educational reform is needed to foster agency in addressing violence.

Using Young’s framework, our studies revolve around: 1) ways individuals or groups encounter any of the five faces of oppression, 2) how oppression is not a result of an individual act but is embedded within larger power structures. By investigating interconnected factors, the panel seeks to unveil various manifestations of oppression’s systemic nature.

The paper “Interrogating the Baker Act through Young’s framework of oppression as a form of violence within Florida schools” seeks to underscore the problematic nature of the 1971 Florida Mental Health Act (i.e. the Baker Act). Though the objective of the legislation was to safeguard patient rights who were suffering from mental illness, it allows for a person exhibiting mental illness with no criminal intent or activity to be taken away and confined against their will. The Baker Act—essentially the arrest, transport, surveillance, hold, and examination of so many children in the state of Florida—is an insidious manifestation of Young’s (1990) conceptualization of oppression, specifically violence. Young writes, “what makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its system character, its existence as a social practice” (p. 57). The Baker Act can therefore be framed as systemic violence especially with the increasing and alarming cases where it is invoked as a form of institutionalization in schools. The paper highlights how the legislation does not distinguish between children and adults, harms students mentally and academically, and unfairly targets students of color. With a humanizing personal narrative included throughout the paper, the panel author offers suggestions for moving forward which includes pedagogies of love (Freire, 1970) as a form of protest.

In “An application of Young’s conceptualization of cultural imperialism to Southeast Asian refugees and the school-to-deportation pipeline,” the panel author utilizes Young’s concept of cultural imperialism to contextualize the siphoning of Southeast Asian (SEA) refugees into the school-to-deportation pipeline. Young (1990) defines cultural imperialism as a sub-group’s experience of “how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other” (p. 66). As whiteness and wealth are prioritized in the U.S. (Rooks, 2017), SEA refugees particularly experience cultural imperialism through unjust laws, disproportionate disciplining in schools and by law enforcement, and placement into a deportation pipeline. Dillard (2018) describes the school-to-deportation pipeline as compulsory interaction with law enforcement and the funneling of immigrant, refugee, and undocumented students into detention, incarceration, and deportation systems. The relativity of cultural imperialism and SEA refugee community members in the pipeline stems from the school-prison trust between North American colonists and Native Tribes (Vaught et al., 2022). Just as colonists asserted the dominance of their norms while marginalizing indigenous tribes, U.S. schools, law enforcement, and the government continue to make invisible and other the SEA refugee community. In this paper, the author examines how cultural imperialism, immigration factors, schools, and law enforcement entangle SEA community members in the school-to-deportation pipeline and offers suggestions for next steps.

In the third study, “Examining the application of Young's framework of oppression beyond the boundaries of species,” the author examines animals' oppression using Young's concept of exploitation, which she defines as the systemic extraction of labor by one group, solely for their own gain, without considering the well-being of the laborers (1990). The emergence of neoliberalism has led to the dominance of large-scale factory farms in the meat, dairy, and eggs market. The unbounded pursuit to maximize the value of commodities has resulted in animals being treated as mere tools for profit maximization (Nibert, 2002). Furthermore, the formation of ideas regarding mass consumption was crucial in neoliberal models. Through power relations, cultural, social and material conditions, the lives of animals are absented and their constructed identities as food, clothes, and laboratory tools are fabricated (Adams, 2021). Building upon Iris Young's (1990) framework, this study aims to investigate the underlying factors influencing animal exploitation and how they manifest in education. It explores curricular opportunities that promote discussions surrounding animal exploitation. By utilizing the power of student's agency to make conscientious choices that prioritize the ethical practices of nonviolence (Butler, 2021), the possibility for change arises.

This panel’s protesting of involuntary institutionalization, cultural imperialism and deportation practices, and animal exploitation represent a unified struggle against oppression. As Simone Weil (1987) highlights, “Someone who does not see a pane of glass does not know that he does not see it. Someone who, being placed differently, does see it, does not know the other does not see it” (p. 2). Oppression is made possible because of what individuals cannot see, so to counter it the power of protest is to make it visible. Therefore, the hope is that this panel brings to light oppression within education and the need for educational reform so that agency is fostered and violence is minimized.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Charlene Krieger, Florida International University

Chair

• Charlene Krieger, Florida International University

Individual Presentations

• Interrogating the Baker Act through Young’s framework of oppression as a form of violence within Florida schools - Charlene Krieger, Florida International University

• An application of Young’s conceptualization of cultural imperialism to Southeast Asian refugees and the school-to-deportation pipeline - Rochelle Lauta Zuniga, Florida International University

• Examining the application of Iris Young's framework of oppression beyond species lines - jihan haidar, Florida International University