(In)Disposable Youth: “At-risk” Subjectivities and Latinx Student Experiences of an Alternative School
Open Access
- Author:
- Lomeli, Hilario
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 11, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Kimberly Anne Powell, Program Head/Chair
Joseph Valente, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Kimberly Powell, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
A K Sandoval-Strausz, Outside Unit, Field & Minor Member
Julio Cammarota, Special Member
Gail Boldt, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- Latinx Students
Disposability
Alternative School
Education Anthropology - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the racialization of urban Latinx youth in alternative school settings. Set in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood in inner-city Houston, the research catalogues everyday Latinx student experiences and the ways they experience, navigate, and survive educational systems of structural inequity. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and a feminist framework that purposefully privileges the voices and the immediate emotional needs of the youth participants, I took seriously respondents’ claims of feeling unwanted, tossed aside, and ignored in educational spaces. I then use students’ own descriptions of their schooling as a starting point to theorize the production of Latinx student as “disposable” and to further develop emerging theories of disposability. Specifically, I traced how educational systems route “undesirable” Latinx students into alternative schools. These structural and institutional processes of dispossession are juxtaposed with rich and complex student narratives that demonstrate how students actively resist, rework, or accept their positioning as “at risk” and/or “troubled.” Finding illustrate how urban education systems are partly reliant on the removal and invisibility of vulnerable youth and how the racialization of Latinx subjects is central to the production of their disposability.