“We Want the Bathrooms Open": Youth Voice and Policy Dilemmas in an Urban High School

• In Event: Making Sense of Youth Voice: Commenting on and Critiquing the Social Contexts of Schooling

Abstract

In schools, students rarely have decision-making power about policies that surveil their bodies and time. School bathrooms are an important site of tension between safety, surveillance, and autonomy. How bathroom rules shape students’ experiences – and how youth respond – remains an understudied issue with the potential to generate insights about youth voice, policy, and perceptions of control. Drawing on interview and observational data from a research-practice partnership, we examine how young people make sense of bathrooms as spaces of privacy and autonomy in schools and how they exert their voices in response. We find that bathrooms become a site of everyday collective punishment for young people. Simultaneously, youth become critical policy actors as they contest these policies publicly and privately.

Authors

• Sarah Bruhn, University of Pennsylvania

• Gabrielle Oliveira, Harvard University

• Whitney M. Hegseth, Boston College

• Rebecca J. Lowenhaupt, Boston College

• Babatunde Alford, Boston College

• Betty Lai, Boston College