There’s Always a Way Out: Spatial Domination, Disappearance, and Free Movement in the Carceral-Education Landscape

This article aims to think beyond schooling as the terrain on which educational liberation might be achieved. Based on ethnographic research with students who have been pushed or pulled into alternative education, I explore how schooling operates through mundane forms of spatial domination that attempt to track, force, and contain the movement of Black and Brown young people within and between places, and across a carceral-education landscape more broadly. Through a Black feminist geographic lens, however, I read below patterns of forced disappearance to consider the ways students disappear themselves. Young people’s persistence in moving freely within and away from sites of spatial domination charts the possibilities for educational liberation beyond formal schooling.