"You Don't Get Treated as a Student": Negotiating Life and Learning in a Carceral Figured World

• In Event: Negotiating Structural Violence in School and Community Settings: Healing Through the Trauma

Abstract

This study centered the learning experiences of incarcerated youth detained in a midsize juvenile detention center. Drawing on figured worlds and other sociocultural theories, I foreground learning in context, particularly how youth perceive everyday learning within their given context. The aim of the study is to understand how incarcerated students navigate, negotiate and re/author their identities in the carceral context. As such, I explored Locke County Juvenile Detention Center as a figured world where youth are constantly positioned and repositioned as residents, students, offenders, and wards of the state. In the analysis, I specifically focus on two students and how they ascribed meaning to themselves and the activity of learning.

Author

• Julissa Ortiz Muñiz, The University of Texas at Austin