Refusing a compulsory want for revenge, or, teaching against retributive justice with liberatory pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Retributive justice serves as a punitive foundation on which Western education is organized. It relies on paternalistic notions of moral goodness with the teacher embodying moral perfection and academe serving as the “neutral” ground on which a student learns to be a “moral” actor. In turn, students of marginalized intersectional difference “pay” for their incapacity to perform correctly. We reject retributive impulses as violent enactments of power. Our goal is humble and direct: abolish the prison industrial complex with everything we've got. And we believe pedagogical contexts provide a relational means to critique and imagine a world free of prisons.

KEYWORDS:

• critical communication pedagogy
• ideology
• liberatory pedagogy
• classroom
• prison abolition

Notes

1 Deut. 19: 21 New International Version.

2 Exod. 21: 23–25 NIV.

3 Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, “Removed, and Making Do,” Text and Performance Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2010): 455.

4 For more on the ways in which racialized gender non-normativity is understood as a sexualized form of physical aggression in need of intervention or “fixing,” see Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

5 Benny LeMaster and Meggie Mapes, “Embracing the Criminal: Queer and Trans Relational Liberatory Pedagogies,” in Queer Intercultural Communication, eds. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Marie Calafell (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2019), 63–77; Meggie Mapes and Benny LeMaster, “You Are Not My Child, I Am Not Your Parent: A Case Against the Infantilization of Students,” in Teaching While _________: Intersectional Perspectives on Critical Pedagogy, eds. Daniel Strasser (Lanham, MD: Lexington, forthcoming).

6 LeMaster and Mapes, “Embracing the Criminal,” 63; see also C. Kyle Rudick and Kathryn B. Golsan, “Civility and White Institutional Presence: An Exploration of White Students’ Understanding of Race-Talk at a Traditionally White Institution,” Howard Journal of Communications 28, no. 4 (2018): 335–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2017.1392910

7 Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, eds. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 21–46.

8 Mapes and LeMaster, “You Are Not My Child.”

9 Andrea Smith, “Boarding School Abuses, Human Rights, and Reparations,” Social Justice 31, no. 4 (2004): 89–102.

10 Ibram X. Kendi, How to be An Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019).

11 For details on the Communication discipline’s summer revolt to whiteness, see Mohan J. Dutta, “Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars,” Culture-Centered Approach (blog), June 2019, http://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2019/06/in-post-made-in-response-to-changes-to.html

12 LeMaster and Mapes, “Embracing the Criminal,” 63.

13 Mapes and LeMaster, “You Are Not My Child.”

14 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1970/2008).

15 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39, no. 1 (2011): 5.

16 Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 73.

17 Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection, 100.

18 John Rawls’ work on political liberalism informs Quong’s argument here. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

19 Interestingly, retributive justice is not understood as a hinderance to one’s freedom nor equality. This is the problem we are engaging here: The discursive mechanism enabling retributivism is informed by a paternalistic impulse such that penalty is for one’s own good and is not a hindrance as a result.

20 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19.

21 Ibid.; see also Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection, 101.

22 PCARE, “Fighting the Prison Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 412; see also PCARE, “PCARE @10: Reflecting on a Decade of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education, While Looking Ahead to New Challenges and Opportunities,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 288–310.

23 Lea Calvert Evering and Gary Moorman, “Rethinking Plagiarism in the Digital Age,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 56, no. 1 (2012): 35.

24 Tiffany Martínez, “Academia, Love Me Back,” Wordpress (blog), October 17, 2016, https://vivatiffany.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/academia-love-me-back/.

25 Charles H.F. Davis III, “Hence, This is Racist,” Insider HigherEd, November 1, 2016, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/11/01/broader-implications-unfairly-accusing-latina-student-plagiarism-essay.

26 Kristin Bulzomi, “Mandatory Attendance Policies are Ableist,” The Daily Evergreen, September 5, 2018, https://dailyevergreen.com/35406/opinion/mandatory-attendance-policies-are-ableist/.

27 We were asked by the editors to add a footnote explaining why we used this spelling. We refuse to name the 45th USAmerican President, Ivanka's father, Melania's husband, by name.