Throwaway Youth: The Sociocultural Location of Resistance to Schooling

This article illuminates the ways in which resistant youth challenge attempts toward cultural homogenization within public school systems. We trace how youth from historical and lived traumatic experiences such as African American, Native American, and youth with histories of domestic violence, navigate the dominant narrative of pity and punishment in public schools. We argue that these resistive youth have been tagged with constructed identities as broken youth. The article situates the practice of school discipline in terms of traditional and neoliberal agendas that seek to throw away noncompliant students and label them as deviant and/or disordered. Drawing from Bauman\u27s (2009) conception of a world where vast numbers of human beings are increasingly seen as expendable and unworthy of a dignified existence, this article seeks to uncover how disciplinary and labeling practices become a vital part of the school-to-prison pipeline. We trace how deficit oriented discourses of historical and familial domestic violence help shape the often-unintentional violent discourses of pity and punishment towards resistant youth in public school settings