"Stones Can Make People Docile": Disciplinary School Spaces and Student Rebellions in Childrens and Young Adult School Stories

School Stories is a subgenre within childrens and young adult literature in which the school environment is the main and most pivotal site of action. Typically, student characters are socialized by their school experience to be responsible future adult citizens who will seamlessly fit within the hegemonic structures of their society. However, there is a stream within the school story subgenre in which the school space is oppressive and attempts to crush students into conformity. While a few studies have been conducted on the school story subgenre, there has yet to be significant attention paid to stories which are critical of institutional educational practices, or any that focus on how the material, physical, and architectural representation of school spaces facilitates students empowering or oppressive experiences. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap by examining school stories that feature oppressive school environments by considering how the spatial properties contribute to the disciplinary structures of school spaces to create student oppression. The present study focuses on stories with oppressive school spaces and questions the ideological structures these stories attempt to break down; the new structures they suggest be put in their place; the desired/imagined futures of institutionalized education these narratives express; and if, or how, implied readers are invited to internalize and enact these changes. To do this, I employ Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebrves theories on disciplinary space, Michel de Certeaus arguments regarding individual resistances to disciplinary spaces, and affect theory to examine characters emotional responses stimulated by the school space. Within school stories that feature oppression, the disciplinary organization of the school space directly influences the interactions of bodies within the space, and it is student characters interactions with one another, and with adults in positions of authority, that elicit constrained and oppressive experiences. Student characters in this study rebel and resist the evasive net of discipline that those in positions of authority employ to order the school space and manipulate the student bodies housed within. Through the resistance of fictional students, these narratives recommend to child and youth readers non-conformist and even revolutionary attitudes that imagine students as the means of achieving changes to their various hegemonic societies