Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2014

Keywords

At Risk Students, Minority Group Students, Educational Attitudes, African American Students, American Indian Students, Family Violence, Public Schools, Discipline Problems, Neoliberalism, Social Attitudes, Youth Problems, Antisocial Behavior, Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This article illuminates the ways in which resistant youth challenge attempts toward cultural homogenization within public school systems. We trace how youth from historical and lived traumatic experiences such as African American, Native American, and youth with histories of domestic violence, navigate the dominant narrative of pity and punishment in public schools. We argue that these resistive youth have been tagged with constructed identities as "broken youth." The article situates the practice of school discipline in terms of traditional and neoliberal agendas that seek to throw away noncompliant students and label them as deviant and/or disordered. Drawing from Bauman's (2009) conception of a world where vast numbers of human beings are increasingly seen as expendable and unworthy of a dignified existence, this article seeks to uncover how disciplinary and labeling practices become a vital part of the school-to-prison pipeline. We trace how deficit oriented discourses of historical and familial domestic violence help shape the often-unintentional violent discourses of pity and punishment towards resistant youth in public school settings.

Publication Title

Equity & Excellence in Education

Volume

47

Issue

4

First Page

531

Last Page

545

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2014.958964

Required Publisher's Statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis inEquity & Excellence in Education on 14 Nov 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10665684.2014.958964

Rights

Copying of this document in whole or in part is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this document for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without the author’s written permission.

Rights Statement

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

Included in

Education Commons

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