“ADULTS SEE EVERYTHING AS DANGEROUS EXCEPT THEMSELVES”: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SAFETY, POLICING, AND PROTECTION IN SCHOOLS

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dc.contributor.advisorSabzalian, Leilani
dc.contributor.authorSpringer, Shareen
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-07T22:22:05Z
dc.date.available2024-08-07T22:22:05Z
dc.date.issued2024-08-07
dc.description.abstractThis study explores ideologies, discourses, and representations of school safety and policing within the United States educational system, motivated by the imperative to understand the transmission and impact of these ideologies on the broader societal constructs of safety, punishment, and mass incarceration. Drawing from the frameworks of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), three central research questions guide the investigation: 1) How do different educational community members (students, policy makers, and community) define school safety (safety for whom, safety from what)?; 2) How do different educational community members (students, policy makers, and community) discursively produce police as safe or unsafe in schools?; 3) What do discourses of school safety and policing show us about the ways students are positioned as dangerous (and by whom), which students are positioned as dangerous, and who must be protected and from what within schools? Analyzing multiple datasets, including school board meetings, online public comments, and conversations with students, the study uncovers both commonalities and tensions within educational communities regarding representations of policing, schools, and students. It identifies shared discursive strategies alongside ideological tensions, highlighting the perpetuation, privileging, and challenging of certain beliefs about policing and about young people that move across contexts and social histories. A significant finding of the research is the central role of adultism in maintaining the interconnectedness between the school and prison systems, thereby perpetuating mass incarceration. This revelation prompts the introduction of YouthCrit as a framework to explicitly address adultism as a unique form of oppression intertwined with other institutional subjugations, and to disrupt carceral logics rooted in colonialism and heteropaternalism. Ultimately, this study advocates for a deeper understanding of the school-prison nexus and emphasizes the importance of challenging deficit representations of students. It calls upon scholars, educators, and practitioners to center the voices and agency of young people in research, interventions, and social movements for community safety.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/29819
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectAbolitionen_US
dc.subjectAdultismen_US
dc.subjectCritical Discourse Analysisen_US
dc.subjectCritical Youth Studiesen_US
dc.subjectSchool Prison Nexusen_US
dc.subjectYouthCriten_US
dc.title“ADULTS SEE EVERYTHING AS DANGEROUS EXCEPT THEMSELVES”: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SAFETY, POLICING, AND PROTECTION IN SCHOOLS
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of Education Studies
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

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