Carceral Educations & Abolition Pedagogies: The Before & Beyond of the School-to-Prison Pipeline Framework

This is a study with and for radical attempts, fugitive expressions and communal abolitionist imaginings resisting and refusing mandates of institutional schooling in the United States. Starting from and experimenting with themes in and around Harney & Moten’s (2013) The Undercommons, this thesis attends to insurgent movement(s) that cannot and/or will not conform to prechoreographed, policed, carceral educations. This thesis attends to and imagines beyond institutions of education and understandings of violence therein, from which the School-to-Prison Pipeline (STPP) framework emerges. I assert that even critical/radical attempts to understand and subvert the STPP framework tend to reform rather than unsettle institutionalized forms of violence that emerge in and as a function of schooling. Chapter 1, Planning, introduces this thesis as an abolitionist text, and considers education within the Prison Industrial Complex. Chapter 2, School-to-Prison Pipeline Framework, discusses policies and practices that contribute to the restriction/punishment of particular (expressions from) students deemed disturbing. Chapter 3, Genealogy, articulates a need to decenter and disorient the mundane in conceptions, imaginings, and reforms within and around the STPP framework. In chapter 4, Fugitivity, blackness and crip more fully emerge as refusals/expressions of anoriginal lawlessness, representing foundational threats to illusions of ontological security. Study, chapter 5, considers abolitionist and communal expressions of black study in schools, and impositions that attempt to prevent these excessive movements and moments. Chapter 6, Policy, attends to students who symbolize risk, as well as attempts and tensions in, among, and between reformist, radical, and abolitionist efforts at changing the conditions of these student’s lives. Chapter 7 experiments with policy’s regulating gesture, the Call to Order, through naturalized components of education and everyday living. Chapter 8 conjures Abolition Pedagogies as imaginaries with and for and contributing to the end of education, and ultimately the world as we know it. Keywords: School-to-Prison Pipeline framework, Abolition, Schooling, Policing, Reform, The Undercommons, Abolition Pedagogies, Refusal, Genealogy