Centripetal Constructions: Juvenile Courts, Schools, Disability, Delinquency, and Coalitions of Resistance
Abstract
This dissertation considers the social, political, legal, cultural, historical, temporal, and other contextual forces concerning educational access for young people experiencing forms of state custody and surveillance at the intersections of multipleidentity markers and inquires into efforts to resist injustices. It also explores educational experiences and institutional interactions of youth identified as deviant, delinquent, and/or disabled, with particular attention on youth transferred from juvenile court jurisdictions to adult criminal courts and jails. Most of the research focuses on urban counties in the Midwest, and one chapter presents an analysis of a national landscape.
The primary methodologies are critical policy analysis, critical archiving processes, activist archiving, and archiving activism. Multiple trans-disciplinary critical frameworks inform and accompany this process, including DisCrit, Critical Policy Studies, Critical Horology, Critical Carceral Studies, Method-Making (McKittrick, 2021), and Sara Ahmed’s (2021) interrogation of the complex phenomenology of institutional complaint procedures and complainants' experiences during complaint processes. The analysis exposes disconnects between policy intentions and policy outcomes and the unjust consequences of those policy fractures experienced and resisted by affected young people and their loved ones. It also reveals how carceral logics inform, intersect with, and buttress institutions such as schools and social agencies.