The Panoptics of Dollar General in Our City

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Enchanted Poetics and Images as Advocacy in Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

As part of a larger parent child autoethnography (Kabuto & Martens, 2014) exploring how my own white children construct understandings of race, this poetic inquiry explores the racial curriculum of the local milieu (Schwab, 1962). Once a white enclave amid a larger hyper-segregated metropolis, Our City has experienced changing racial demographics over the past twenty years. As I conducted interviews and collected field notes, I found that the proliferation of dollar stores in Our City was significant to many and represented a proxy for changing racial and socioeconomic demographics. Here I share methodology I term poetic juxtaposition to ground my findings in the literature, specifically Foucalt’s (1979) writing on the Panopticon

Author

• Rhianna K. Thomas, New Mexico State University