Gendered Constructions of Criminal Justice-Based Dispossession in Schools: Latinas and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: Girl Studies in Settler Societies

Abstract

Through combining portraiture with youth participatory action research (YPAR), this paper highlights how Latina girls are disproportionately caught within the tight spaces of punitive school discipline practices. The visual data from this New York City-YPAR project identify three processes of dispossession by which young Latinas are affected by the school-to-prison pipeline: institutional abandonment as disinvestment in girls’ personhood, social isolation, and deprivation of agency and self-control. The presentation concludes with a discussion of how doing justice work for girls trapped inside the multiple sites of the pipeline also requires multi-sited strategizing.

Presenter

• Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts, Boston