Get “With It”: Extending the Study of Educational Carcerality and an Educational Abolitionism Praxis

Abstract

The merging of prison or carceral studies and education is longstanding. In fact, there is an omnipresence of an educational studies foundations that analyzes and interrogates the role of carceral logics in schools and prisons. I refer to these foundations as the study of “educational carcerality,” and in this article, I demonstrate how such an analytical heuristic affords a more capacious understanding of how carcerality structures schooling and educational processes. However, the interpellation of abolition with educational carcerality is taking a newfound life as social movements across the United States have researchers, scholars, and organizers theorize on the abolition question more explicitly. As education scholars, we are in urgent need of continued thoughtful scholarly engagement with existing and developing literatures and questions centered on pedagogy and education through an abolitionist perspective. I offer “educational abolitionism praxis” as a guide forward toward alternative theorizations of schooling in the United States and alternative modes of pedagogy and educational lifeworlds. The aim is not to delineate what educational abolitionism is, but to dis-orient us toward an experimental tool that fundamentally shifts what is made possible through a focus on abolition and its offerings.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Chicago and Bay Area youth I have taught and worked alongside with for their meaningful engagement that led to the interrogation of my ideas on carcerality and schooling that made this article possible. As they taught me: If the theory ain’t tight, our practices won’t be either. Thank you, also, to the anonymous reviewers and editors of Educational Studies for their generous, generative, and substantial feedback that strengthened various components of this manuscript. Any shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 While I initially interpersonally racialized this student as “Afro-Mexican” after he disclosed to me that he was African American and Mexican, he deliberately pushed back against this. Instead, he remarked, “I’m Black and Mexican.” To honor how he self-identifies, I included his racialized disposition as “Black and Mexican” throughout the article.