Narrating From the Margins: Pushing Back Against Surveillance in Partnership with Schools and Communities

Prevalent today are surveillance policies and practices in urban schools and marginalized communities. This panel seeks to address racial hierarchies of power through an analysis of surveillance stemming from critical research in partnership with schools and communities. Most forms of surveillance operate under deficit based perspectives framing communities of color as damaged (Tuck, 2009) at the system and individual level, ranging from administrative policies to student and teacher relationships. Our critical ethnographic work aims to illuminate how oppressive mechanisms operate, allowing for individuals and collectives to disrupt and challenge dehumanizing modes of surveillance. Preliminary findings from interviews and field observations based on three on-going projects in western Massachusetts demonstrate how pervasive, oppressive, and traumatic surveillance can be. Context matters, and we hope to demonstrate the ways surveillance shapes unjustly practices and policies for minoritized youth and their implications for teachers, youth advocates, and other educators.Papers include the following:

·"Youth should be afraid of us": Disrupting damage narrative through embodied arts – Andrew Torres, UMass Amherst

·An eye toward the ecological domain: Ethnic Studies teachers' ecologies of support and oppression – Thomas Albright, UMass Amherst

·Fostering youth identities and diasporic voices through literary texts – Alisha Smith Jean-Denis, UMass Amherst