Schools as Sites of Surveillance: Carceral Care Work and the Domestic War on Terror

Keywords: schooling, national security, prisons, carcerality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 77

Abstract

In 2015, President Obama formally launched a new national security framework known as countering violent extremism (CVE). While Obama celebrated CVE as a liberal alternative to conventional counterterrorism methods, critics viewed these developments as a way to intensify policing by moving security projects into intimate sites like the schoolhouse and transforming trusted adults like teachers into informants. Though important to understanding the evolution of racialized antiterrorism practices, these critiques miss how the schoolhouse has always functioned to contain, control, and enclose minoritized children. In this presentation, I focus on how CVE draws from previous community policing paradigms to further activate care work that strengthens already-existing carceral power. I theorize these policing arrangements as “carceral care work” to highlight how the US security state uses the provision of social services to expand the criminalization of communities of color, while appearing to attenuate past practices of governmental overreaching, racial profiling, and coercive policing. The concept of carceral care work therefore does not denote a departure from past policing practices but a continuation of them; the concept, however, intends to highlight the liberal narratives and frameworks used to justify, normalize, and advance these illiberal practices, particularly in school spaces.