EBOOK Girls Behind Bars

Girls Behind Bars: Reclaiming Education in Transformative Spaces, intervenes in this critical moment of unprecedented incarceration of young girls and participates in their struggle to reclaim education and create possibilities for personal and political 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 young girls is postured as problematic. Standing exposed is the exclusion of young girls behind bars 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 and reconceptualizes young girls behind bars as agents of change to reclaim their own education. This book repositions contemporary debates in educational inquiry, institutional policy and school and curriculum practice by opening up and giving voice to a neglected, silenced, and misrepresented population - young girls behind bars.