16.061-3 - Child Protection? Engaging the Politics of Childhood in a Carceral Landscape

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

Papers in the session attend to the nuanced artifact of childhood in this shifting carceral state. How has the child shaped policy? How does the child’s ostensibly “apolitical” quality mobilize adults on behalf of the child? How do competing conceptions of children’s innocence or experience, their economic pricelessness or utility, their affluence or privation, their deservingness or undeservingness, determine the course of state action? The child—along with all involved institutions including schools, families, and juvenile justice systems—is a key technology of a shifting carceral regime. As the United States begins to engage in rethinking facets of our prison nation, the child represents a significant and undertheorized educational justice scholars must examine.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Educators for Social Justice

Chair

• Michael Wilson, Teachers College, Columbia University

Papers

• Delinquency as Labor - Chrissy Anderson-Zavala, University of California - Santa Cruz

• The Politics of Childhood, Cognitive Disability, and the "Bare Life" in the Carceral State - Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama; Dean L Adams, University of Toledo

• The "Child" in Child Study: Disrupting the Boundaries of Race and Gender in the Field - Sabina Elena Vaught, Tufts University; Elise M. Harris, Tufts University

• Inscriptions of White Settler and Carceral Schooling Practices on Young People's Bodies - Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts at Boston

• The Problem Child: Provocations on Dismantling the Carceral State - Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University