Theatrical epistemologies: Post-critical autoethnography, education, and young women in detention
Abstract
This research maps a six-year journey of my experience as an English teacher for young women in detention. In the detention classroom, I experienced a wide gap between the institutional demands of detention, rehabilitation, and education on the one hand and the educational experiences of students on the other. The study employs post-feminist and poststructural reading practices to examine historical discourses constitutive of detention and its impact on the education of young women in detention. Using post-critical autoethnography, I present my understanding of the life-stories of young women in detention to attend to my troubling awareness that students’ life-stories are neither acknowledged, nor are they condoned in detention, rehabilitation, and education. Students’ lived experiences trouble my own life-stories on multiple levels. Students’ autobiographical writing complicates simplistic understandings of young women in detention as a naturalized, gendered, and universal category. The research suggests an epistemological shift in the way young women in detention are understood; a shift that calls into question all forms of centeredness, essentialism, and universality that engender exclusion. A shift such as this does not claim any epistemological or ontological primacy; rather, it offers space for rethinking the life-stories of young women in detention differently, therefore, re-envisioning education in detention.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Malewski, Purdue University.
Subject Area
School Administration|Curriculum development
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