Join this webinar hosted by the Office of Access and Community Engagement to hear from Subini Annamma.
Speaker Abstract:
Incarcerated young people are often not discussed in education research and when they are, their voices are rarely heard. Though the state argues that it rescues and rehabilitates these young people, Rodriguez (2023) counters that human capture is now the goal of the state instead of a means of rehabilitation. I build on Rodriguez and Charles Mills (2007) to argue that imprisoned young people have been captured, and their childhoods have been erased from public memory by state technologies of white ignorance. I then look to Tina Campt (2017) to seek a different kind of capture of imprisoned youth, one that captures their humanity in addition to their dispossession. Sharing the initial results of a survey with over 400 imprisoned youth, we found that imprisoned Black and Brown children are disproportionately disabled and/or queer. In this talk, I trace the technologies of capture that they experience in education, explore ways to capture their humanity and resistance, and then call for a different kind of education, one rooted in abolition.