Unsettling Foundations of School Pushout: Toward Intersectional Perspectives of Educational Carcerality

ABSTRACT This article reviews existing foundational scholarly conversations on school pushout across sociological and interdisciplinary sets of literature, paying careful attention to central ideas and arguments from scholarship that speaks to the study of punishment, discipline, and exclusion in schooling and societal contexts. We review two salient themes that resulted from our enduring engagement with school pushout discourses: (1) gendered “doing” in school discipline and punishment, and (2) punishment, pushouts, and the outsourcing of the racialized “problem.” Through intellectual affordances provided by scholarly uptakes of intersectionality within Black feminist traditions, we draw on these themes in an attempt to unsettle foundations of school pushout by formulating an articulation for intersectional perspectives rooted in broader conceptions of educational carcerality.