Unsettling calm and order: the paradoxical dynamics of a white elementary teacher’s racialized carceral logics

Abstract

Schooling functions as a central institutional facet of the carceral state. For those educators who seek to practice abolition in their classrooms, understanding how policing is enacted systemically and interpersonally in schooling spaces is critical to futures of belonging, safety, and freedom. In this paper, I draw from a larger qualitative case study to explore how one white elementary teacher, Staci, sought to disrupt her instantiations of policing and co-create a humanizing approach to students’ social and emotional safety. Theoretically guided by Shange’s carceral progressivism, I delineate the ways in which Staci both pedagogically centered the social worlds and expansive emotions of students most vulnerable to the structural violence of policing and reinforced racialized carceral logics as white supremacy at the same time. I deeply interrogate these paradoxical instantiations of abolitionist praxis and conclude with an invitation for educators, especially white educators, to work with contradictions.