Fractured Epistemologies: Autoethnographic Telling, Voices, and Counter-Voices of Youth Excluded from Public Education

The study intervenes in this critical moment of unprecedented incarceration of youth and participates in their struggle to reclaim education and create possibilities for personal, political, and curriculum transformation. The intersection of race, class, gender and other markers of difference combined with the educational discourse of high-stakes testing, academic success/failure, and school-to-college expectations that prime institutional pathologizing of certain groups of youth is postured as problematic. Standing exposed is the exclusion of youth in the prison system from the conversation that is public education. Difference as the point of transformative possibilities through student voice and embodied performance unmasks dominant educational knowledge and practices in curriculum conversations and reconceptualizes youth behind bars as agents of change to reclaim their own education. This study repositions contemporary debates in curriculum inquiry, institutional policy and school practice by opening up and giving voice to a neglected, silenced, and misrepresented population – youth behind bars