Erica R. Meiners

Purged: Undocumented Students, Financial Aid Policies, and Access to Higher Education

This article examines how the denial of financial aid constrains undocumented students from pursuing higher education and discusses the interlocking relationship between federal immigration and higher education policies. Reporting on research data identifying that undocumented students pay for their education through work, family contributions, few scholarships, and strategies such as working more and taking fewer classes, this article also links the stress placed on undocumented students and their families to Latino retention and graduation rates. Este manuscrito examina como el negar ayuda financiera constriñe a estudiantes sin-documentos para continuar su educación superior y discute las relaciones eslabonadas entre inmigración federal y políticas de educación superior. Basado en información obtenida en investigaciones identifica que estudiantes sin documentos pagan por su educación a través de trabajo, contribuciones familiares, algunas becas y estrategias como trabajando más y llevando menos clases. Este manuscrito también liga la tensión puesta en estos estudiantes y sus familias de bajos recursos con la taza de graduación y retención Latina.

Resisting the school to prison pipeline: the practice to build abolition democracies

In possession of the largest prison population in the world, the United States currently locks up over 2.3 million people (Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project 2008). Dispropo...

Doing and feeling research in public: queer organizing for public education and justice

Grounded in activism – fighting the implementation of Department of Defense‐run schools in a public schools system; organizing to fight the largest national teacher education accreditation agency’s removal of sexual orientation and social justice from its accreditation standards; and protesting a state’s decision to hold a public meeting for teacher educators at a private Christian college that ‘condemns’ homosexuality – this article highlights how education is being re‐formed through appeals to ‘private choice’ and at the same time select public issues are devalued by being called private and outside the bounds of normative ‘professional’ attention. This reframing, a hallmark of contemporary neoliberalism, has specific ramifications for queers, as analysis of these cases indicate. Using collaborative participatory research that attends to emotions, the authors argue that feelings are political and problematizing, and useful – they can trigger tactics. With the goal of offering examples of tactics tried, the paper archives evidence – original texts including pledges, letters, flyers, and emails – of queer organizing in education.

Militarism and Education Normal

With the military’s ready and waiting personnel, infrastructure, and resources, no one should be surprised that the JROTC [Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps] is now offered as the alternative to physical education in urban school districts, or that the Department of Defense has responded to the educational crisis by opening and staffing public military schools. Currently, the military is education normal.… [P]ublic schools [have become] recruiting entities, and their targeting is not race, class, or gender neutral. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Ecologies of School Discipline for Queer Youth: What Listening to Queer Youth Teaches Us About Transforming School Discipline

Bellinger et al. feature queer youths’ voices to illuminate the ways in which they are formally and informally sanctioned, disciplined, and pushed out of school. The authors investigate two under-explored questions: (1) how do queer youth’s experiences with school discipline relate to their intersecting identities? and (2) how are those discipline experiences connected to and/or shaped by their experiences with bullying and harassment? Three themes emerged: schools as sites of gender normativity and regulation, complex social ecologies of school discipline, and acts of resistance and self-advocacy. The authors recommend a comprehensive, contextualized approach to rectify the disparate impact of school discipline on queer youth to uncover, understand, and respond to the ways institutional and interpersonal biases (direct and implicit) play out in school communities.

Uneasy locations: complexities from a high school for formerly incarcerated men and women

The first part of this article situates and describes the conceptualization, implementation and ‘success’ of a project—an alternative high school for formerly incarcerated men and women—within the flourishing prison industrial complex in the United States, a structure that disproportionately impacts poor people and/or people of colour. The second part, snapshots/stories to break your heart offers two anecdotal “emotional striptease” (Fusco 2001) moments from the start of this project to illustrate the complexities that have arisen, or, simply, the need to do more. Finally, a brief postcript, outstanding in our field? that queries how I (and others in this project) struggle with negotiating the university/community relationships and the ‘hero’ trap.The first part of this article situates and describes the conceptualization, implementation and ‘success’ of a project—an alternative high school for formerly incarcerated men and women—within the flourishing prison industrial complex in the United States, a structure that disproportionately impacts poor people and/or people of colour. The second part, snapshots/stories to break your heart offers two anecdotal “emotional striptease” (Fusco 2001) moments from the start of this project to illustrate the complexities that have arisen, or, simply, the need to do more. Finally, a brief postcript, outstanding in our field? that queries how I (and others in this project) struggle with negotiating the university/community relationships and the ‘hero’ trap.

Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition Through the Good the Bad and the Innocent

Example # 1, from Jessi: I is the 8th week of English class in our adult high school completion program, and we have just read a short excerpt from Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? As a class, we review vocabulary words, and then, piece by piece, work to understand Daviss argument for prison abolition. All of the students have firsthand experience of the system, and they agree that the prison system is clearly racist in its impact. But when we get to the point of discussing abolition—of shutting down prisons—the class quiets. The disagreements start. “I agree with abolishing the death penalty, but . . .” “But some people need to get locked up.” “I agree we need to change the system, but getting rid of prisons entirely . . .” “It’s too much . . .” “I don’t think we need to go that far . . .” I find myself in the awkward position of being the only person without direct experience of being locked up, and the only vocal abolitionist. By the end of our conversation, I perceive that students have made up their minds and are united in their analysis: the prison system is messed up, but abolition is “going too far.” I wonder to myself what went wrong in our conversation. Why was I not able to present abolition in a way that challenged people to go further or question their assumptions about the necessity of prisons?

Queer kinks and the arc of justice: meditations on failure, persistence, and public education

ABSTRACT The Trump administration has quickly rescinded some of the limited protections made available to some gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people – for example employment protections for LGBT federal employees – and has doubled down on a military agenda – proposing increased federal funds to the military. This political moment – a more nakedly visible endorsement of structures of oppression – falls on the heels of the neoliberal ‘gay-friendly’ military-lite Obama regime. Building on eight years of participatory observation in counter-recruitment movements and community mobilizations against the militarization of public schools, and participation in concurrent queer justice movements, this essay engages policy analysis and archival work, to map struggles against the military industrial complex (MIC) in schools against and with LGBTQ justice movements, offering meditations on failure, persistence, public education, and approaching organizing queerly.

Fierce Urgency of Now: Building Movements to End the Prison Industrial Complex in Our Schools.

This article argues that prison abolition and education must be thought and practiced together, now more than ever. Drawing on a forum, Without Walls: Abolition & Rethinking Education in Oakland, CA to dialogue about strategies to challenge carceral logics in classrooms and communities, this article contextualizes the intensification of policing and the criminalization of young people and communities that continues to reach into and beyond all levels of K-12 schools. We share a number of suggestions and starting places based on the ways many educators and youth advocates are building the capacity to challenge the prison industrial complex.

Words to Build Movements, Cultures, and Our Futures: A Review of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and The Transgender Studies Reader 2

Raising questions and making linkages between ongoing movements, particularly those surrounding LGBTQ youth and related research, and academic fields, this book review essay engages the new Transgender Studies Reader with Normal Life.