Youth, School, and Community: Participatory Institutional Ethnographies

This book examines how young people’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion are shaped by extended social relations, coordinating thought and conduct across time and space. Working with young people and using a range of participatory institutional ethnographic strategies, Naomi Nichols investigates the social and institutional relations which differentially punctuate the lives of youth. While the research begins with what young people know and have experienced, this starting place anchors a deeper investigation of the public sector institutions and institutional processes that remain implicated in social-historical-economic processes of global capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

Youth, School, and Community connects the dots between, on the one hand, the abstract objectified accounts produced by institutions and enabling institutional action and accounting practices, and, on the other hand, the actual material conditions of young people’s lives and development, which these accounts obscure. The focus on specific policies and procedures that produce young people’s experiences of racialized inclusion/exclusion and safety/risk make this book particularly useful to academics, professionals, and activists who want to ensure that young people experience equitable access to public sector resources and not disproportionate exposure to public sector punishments and punitive interventions.