Episode 3 | Carceral Curriculum: It's By Design

During our three-part series on the carceral curriculum in our schools, we ask, “How do we abolish carcerality in our schools (and beyond)?” In this second episode, we ask Dr. Rahsaan Mahadeo: “How are schools designed for carcerality?” Rahsaan challenges us to consider how schools become places of racialized disablement for Black and Brown students through curriculum and discipline policies. Mahadeo implores us to consider how educators can refuse to consent to participate in school-based carcerality and to understand our complicity in upholding carcerality in our schools. Special education expert, LeShone Jai, adds complexity to our discussion of IEPs. In “What I Don’t Get Paid For,” Kishanna Laurie gets us to delete the email app from our phones and #ReclaimOurTime. Poet Kweku John moves us with a poem about dance inspired by Adinkra symbols. Thank you for listening. Love, us.

Intellectual Inheritance:

Thank you to Rahsaan Mahadeo for recommending many of these texts in our conversation with him. And the ones he did not recommend were inspired by his words.

W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro Criminal and Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (open rebellion)
Saidiyah Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Jina B. Kim, Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s “Enabling Whom?”  (racialized disablement)
Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez, coined the term “culture of poverty”
Mary Oliver, Upstream
Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (creative destruction)
Carla Shalaby, Troublemakers
Damien Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles

Music:

O. Y Productions, Afrobeat x Amapiano Instrumental | Afrobeat Type Beat 2021 - Happy
Smith the Master, Green Tea

Original theme music by Mara Johnson, Elliott Wilkes, and monét cooper