UC Davis

Abstract

Toward What Freedom?Youth Literacies and Knowledges in a Carceral State

by

Adam D. Musser

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

University of California, Davis

Professor Maisha T. Winn, Chair

The struggle for freedom is not new, but it may be as urgent as ever. The consistent murders of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people by police in the United States remind us that nowhere is freedom equally available. Moreover, the shared, if again unequal, effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic reveal how dangerous a purely individual, personal sense of freedom can be. But what does freedom mean? This is the question I asked young people in youth prisons. To my knowledge, this study offers the first scholarly analysis of freedom as conceived by young people experiencing incarceration. We know of the damage and destruction wrought by the incarceration of our children (Annamma, 2016; Meiners, 2007; Winn, 2011). What we need to know more of is how they envision the freedom they desire. In centering definitions of freedom articulated by young people experiencing incarceration, I argue that educators in all settings can encourage an understanding of freedom that recognizes a collective responsibility to our shared humanity. This study contributes to discussions at the intersections of teacher education, critical literacy, and critical pedagogy by clarifying what it is that young people envision when they think and write about freedom. Teacher education must confront the role schooling plays in the maintenance and (re)production of normalized violence against children, youth, and their communities. This includes how we teach about freedom. When Black people are killed on the streets and in their homes by the police, who is free? When choosing not to wear a face covering in a global pandemic caused by a highly contagious respiratory virus is a question of personal freedom, what does freedom even mean? I write from the theoretical position that the full humanity of every student must become and remain the primary focus of education. How is education – at every level and for every subject – oriented toward freedom that allows us to recognize and honor all humanity? Through the theoretical lenses of critical literacy and critical social theory, I positioned young writers experiencing incarceration as producers of transformative critical knowledge, a concept I defined as knowledge that is intended to generate more justice within social systems and/or human relationships. This knowledge is critical because it is oriented toward justice and it is sensitive to the relations of power that make freedom (and humanity) available to some and deny it to others. This knowledge is transformative because it is intended to transform our relationships to each other and the social systems which govern our lives. Questions of knowledge, power, and freedom lie at the heart of critical literacy practice and theory. Critical literacy research in schools has shown that young people’s literacy practices can expand narrow notions of learning and intellectual activity (de los Ríos & Seltzer, 2017; Lee, 2001; San Pedro, 2015), while research in out-of-school spaces documents how young people from nondominant communities extend traditional conceptions of learning and language through their expansive literacy practices (Gutiérrez, 2008; Paris, 2011; Winn, 2011). Recent research with young people in youth prisons reveals that youth resist the effects of their criminalization in artistic ways (Annamma, 2016) and find the opportunity to historicize their pasts and design their futures through writing (Christankis & Mora, 2018). In these contexts, research documents the inadequacy of dominant notions of teaching and learning by elevating the power of young people’s knowledge production and their own authentic meaning making. Using ethnographic research methods, I asked what writing afforded young people experiencing incarceration and what they meant when they wrote about freedom. As an ethnographic participant in youth prison writing workshops for two years, I collected data from different places, people, and perspectives. Methods included participant observation in youth prison writing workshops, textual analysis of more than 6,000 writing samples, and open-ended interviews with young people in youth prisons and the adults who facilitate youth prison writing workshops. Data analysis included three rounds of qualitative coding in which I grounded codes and generated categories in multiple sources of data to develop themes across young people’s conceptions of freedom. Five themes of freedom emerged from my analysis. Young writers experiencing incarceration defined freedom: (1) in terms of the human relationships that mattered in their lives; (2) in relation to the physical spaces of the world that were available to them; (3) within a critique of social systems; (4) as the ability to make sustainable life choices; (5) in a process of historicized self-awareness. Findings show that young writers experiencing incarceration use writing as a tool for personal and social change and that freedom is a physical, social, internal, historicized, humanizing practice. The findings of this study have implications for how we teach and talk about freedom. Schools have traditionally failed to teach about freedom as a social, collective, and interdependent practice. As both COVID-19 and The Movement for Black Lives make clear, we depend on each other’s understanding and practice of freedom. Our shared, if unequal, experiences of COVID-19 and the continued power of white supremacy to perpetuate violence across all intersections of life, also experienced unequally, demonstrate just how urgent educating for freedom is. Achieving this kind of education requires both refusal and imagination. We must refuse a return to what was normal, and we must imagine a new one (Laura, 2018; Roy, 2020). This study offers one way of refusing and imagining. In this study, I compiled a body of knowledge on freedom that emerged from writings by young people experiencing incarceration and I showed that their literacy practices afford expansive possibilities for collective understandings of what freedom is and can be. I argued that in order to build human relationships and social systems around an authentic practice of freedom, we must include the knowledges of young people experiencing incarceration in the ongoing struggle.