Dissertation Proposal Defense

Title: By Any Means Necessary: Criminalization, Trauma and Resilience of Black Girls and Boys in an Inner-City Neighborhood

FRIDAY, January 29, 2021, 11 AM
Zoom – Details below

Committee Members
Dr. Nancy Naples (Chair)
Dr. Christin Munsch
Dr. Phoebe Godfrey

Abstract: While the U.S. accounts for nearly five percent of the world’s population, The U.S. is responsible for holding twenty-five percent of the world’s population in bondage. For many Black youth living in areas of concentrated disadvantage, having contact with the prison industrial complex- whether directly or vicariously, is nearly inevitable. Police brutality occurs in their communities and is an ever-present threat in their everyday lives. This crisis has generated scholarly interest pertaining to the criminalization of young individuals through policing and penalization in urban and under-resourced minority communities. I argue that a hyper-focus on criminalization tends to obscure the experiences of chronic urban trauma, trauma built up over the long term due to repeated damaged done to certain places and vulnerable people through state violence (Pain 2019). State violence in urban spaces may result in youth becoming spectators or victims themselves with little opportunity for positive systemic intervention as such violence has been normalized and legitimized and covertly operates through processes of penalization. Thus, this research emplaces the idea of criminalization in dialogue with chronic urban trauma (Pain 2019) to examine how repeated damage done to certain places through state violence (policing, penalization, and punishment) may become normalized and legitimated. In this research I seek to utilize an intersectional lens to discuss the place-based effects of policing. Thus, the goal of this research is twofold. Drawing on ethnographic data and semi-structured and unstructured interviews I utilize an intersectional approach to first, investigate how state violence, specifically processes of criminalization of Black boys and girls, constitute a key mechanism for which trauma is reproduced in Black inner-city youths’ lives. Secondly, I wish to examine the creative and adaptive strategies which Black youth enact in order to resist and recover from the place-based systemic physical and symbolic violence they experience.