Empowerment in a Controlling Place

Author(s): Max A. Greenberg

Source: Sociological Perspectives , AUGUST 2018, Vol. 61, No. 4 (AUGUST 2018), pp. 610-625
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26580590

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26580590?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Sociological Perspectives

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
742115
research-article2017
SPXXXX10.1177/0731121417742115Sociological PerspectivesGreenberg

Adolescents and Young Adults

Sociological Perspectives
2018, Vol. 61(4) 610­–625
Empowerment in a Controlling © The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
Place: Youth Program Facilitators sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0731121417742115
https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121417742115
and Resistance to School Discipline journals.sagepub.com/home/spx

Max A. Greenberg1

Abstract
Research has described a nearly monolithic culture of control that shapes the disciplinary
practices and experiences of youth in urban schools. However, existing research does not
adequately account for the diverse actions of school-based adults in relation to school discipline.
Drawing on four years of fieldwork in violence prevention programs implemented in classrooms
throughout Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), this study explores how program
facilitators create and sustain a cultural frame of empowerment within the context of the culture
of control. As the findings reveal, facilitators narrowed and refined empowerment, emphasizing
student anonymity and leveling classroom authority. This enactment of empowerment
temporarily subverted disciplinary and punitive mechanisms in ways that meaningfully impacted
individuals. This article applies the theoretical framework of cultural heterogeneity to educational
contexts, arguing that while schools are sites of an overarching culture of control, school-based
adults enact multiple, often conflicting cultural frames.

Keywords
children and youth, crime, law, and deviance, education, empowerment, school discipline,
culture

In regular in-class education [students] are talked down to and they must listen to authority. Similarly,
in their lives, they don’t have the opportunity to speak up . . . Where other people go, “Shut up. You’re
a kid. Sit in the corner and this is what you need to do.” We don’t do that. We come from a place of
empowerment.

—Kim, youth program facilitator

The cultural consequences of discipline and control on students are a long-standing concern in
sociology (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Durkheim 1961). Writing about schooling, Durkheim
stated that “the rule, because it teaches us to restrain and master ourselves, is a means of emanci-
pation and of freedom” (Durkheim 1961:48; Prus 2011). Recently, a considerable thread of
research has described schools, particularly urban public schools, as sites of a near monolithic

1Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Max A. Greenberg, Department of Sociology, Boston University, 96 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
Email: maxgreen@bu.edu

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 611

system of punishment and control, similar to prisons (Hirschfield 2008a). This research has
examined how, in many schools, a “culture of control” is manifest in crime control strategies,
such as zero-tolerance policies, willful defiance write-ups, truancy tickets, expulsions, and wide-
spread surveillance, with dire consequences for students (Kupchik 2012; Nolan 2011b; Perry and
Morris 2014; Kupchick and Catlaw 2015; Rios 2011).
Much of the existing research on schools situates the culture of control in abstract mechanisms
and does not adequately examine the diverse cultural frames that adults hold as they decide how
to interact with students within the school. Disciplinary practices do not enact themselves, nor
are they by any means the only cultural messages that students receive. Administrators, teachers,
staff, school resources officers, and others all signal cultural meanings to students through a
variety of means, including, but not limited to, disciplinary action. Drawing on a theoretical
approach originally deployed to understand cultural heterogeneity in marginalized urban neigh-
borhoods, this article contends that the cultural frames carried by adults in schools are diverse,
even while they are embedded within an overarching culture of control (Harding 2007).
One key example of the varied cultural logics in schools comes from outside programs, for
example, those run through nonprofit organizations, which have increasingly implemented pro-
grams to support and empower marginalized youth. As a consequence, classrooms have opened
up to new actors: representatives of a growing field of “empowerment projects” that set out to
transform marginalized young people’s “personal feelings and sense of self, to cure them of their
social ills by ‘empowering’ them” (Eliasoph 2011:4; see also Cruikshank 1999). Facilitators
come into schools with an orientation, skills, and responsibilities that diverge from the overarch-
ing cultural context of discipline in urban schools significantly, and thus, they provide an opening
through which to examine the heterogeneous cultural frames that exist in schools and their rela-
tionship to an overarching culture of control.
Drawing on four years of fieldwork in violence prevention and healthy relationship programs
implemented in classrooms throughout Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), this
study explores how facilitators create and sustain empowerment within the context of classrooms
where the prevailing culture supports school discipline. Compared with other school actors—
such as teachers, guidance counselors, or administrators—facilitators are physically and tempo-
rarily bounded. They implement a curricular program, often one class-session each week, over
the course of one to a dozen weeks. It is required, although not always guaranteed, that a school
official, often a teacher, remains in the classroom while the program occurs. How is empower-
ment put into action in this circumscribed context?
As the findings reveal, facilitators drew on a cultural frame of empowerment that they had
learned in their training and which was reinforced in organizational participation. The empower-
ment frame construed young people as social actors in their own right, capable of making their
own decisions about their lives and, in turn, viewed facilitators’ role as providing choices and
supporting their decisions. Within the confines of the culture of control in schools, facilitators
narrowed and refined their frame of empowerment in relation to core mechanisms of control: in
response to mechanisms of labeling, they emphasized student anonymity, and in response to
disciplinary authority, they symbolically leveled classroom authority. Even as their frame of
empowerment was constrained by the culture of control, it still served to shape their actions, and
they temporarily subverted disciplinary and punitive mechanisms in ways that meaningfully
impacted individuals.

The Cultures of Urban Schools

Recent scholarship has shown that there has been a disciplinary turn in schooling, and that the
attendant practices have consequences on youth. This literature situates the disciplinary turn in
schools within what Garland (2001) referred to as the “culture of control,” a widely accepted way

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
612 Sociological Perspectives 61(4)

of thinking about social problems that constructs punishment and social control as logical and
even necessary (Rios 2011; Simon 2007; Foucault 1977). Within this “culture of control,”
schools, particularly urban public schools, have been reshaped by heightened police presence,
multiple forms of surveillance, and exclusionary punishment (Bracy 2011; Kupchik 2012; Lyons
and Drew 2006; Nolan 2011; Perry and Morris 2014; Rios 2011). This has transformed urban
education for youth of color in ways that differ from and outpace the consequences at majority-
white schools (Hirschfield 2008; Kupchik and Ward 2014; Morris 2005; Ramey 2015; Welch and
Payne 2010).
Scholars have pointed to distinct mechanisms that transmit the cultural logic of control to
students within classrooms even while disciplinary practices take place across the school—in
hallways, playgrounds, and other contexts—and have ramifications that reach out into communi-
ties and homes through suspension, expulsion, and arrest (Nolan 2011). In one mechanism,
described as labeling, schools mark students as criminals, troublemakers, and at risk, and those
labels shape how others view the person, and in turn, shape how they act as they live up to the
label (Becker 1963). Rios argues that, in the era of mass incarceration, labeling is multiplied, as
“agencies of social control further stigmatize and mark [individuals] in response to their original
label,” creating a “vicious cycle” of punitive treatment and institutional interventions (Ferguson
2001; Rios 2011:45). In a second mechanism, the imposition of harsh disciplinary authority, such
as occurs with zero-tolerance policies and ticketing for minor offenses, behavior is normalized
and police and school safety officers enter into schools for otherwise noncriminal actions, which
can accelerate what would otherwise be small incidents into juvenile justice, or even criminal
justice, concerns (Kupchik 2012; Nolan 2011; Perry and Morris 2014).
Existing research has often described youth culture and school culture as oppositional, with
adults, often hidden from the analytic view, constructing a culture of control, and cultural resis-
tance bubbling up through students from below (Arum 2005; Nolan 2011). Scholars have
explored the multiple consequences of this pervasive culture of control on students. Some have
argued that it can prepare students for a life of surveillance, punishment, and discipline (Perry
and Morris 2014; Rios 2011). Excluded and punished youth suffer directly in terms of education,
grades, and dropout rates (Kang-Brown et al. 2013; Perry and Morris 2014). Even for those stu-
dents not feeling the direct effects of criminalization, the culture of control promotes “legal cyni-
cism,” the view of law enforcement as illegitimate, and creates a sense of injustice and “shared
skepticism of a range of governmental institutions” (Brayne 2014; Hagan, Shedd, and Payne
2005:398; Losen and Gillespie 2012). Students may resist harsh school discipline or avoid it—
even while doing so may heighten the consequences—as a means to recuperate autonomy and
dignity in the face of structural marginalization (Rios 2011; Sennett and Cobb 1972). Taken
together, the existing scholarship on school discipline provides few examples of students engag-
ing with adults who are not directly representing the system of school discipline.
The nearly monolithic image of school discipline that is presented in existing research
leaves out much of the cultural dynamics at work in schools, particularly an array of frames
carried by adults that could mediate the effects of harsh discipline. While they are rarely the
subject of sociological study, many teachers and administrators work from inside the schools
to challenge the culture of control using diverse strategies (Nolan 2011). We know, from the
scholarly literature on care in schools, that some school-based adults, such as teachers and
administrators, seek to cultivate connections and support students, particularly youth margin-
alized by race and class (Holland 2015; Kirk et al. 2017). For example, Angela Valenzuela
(1999) shows how teachers in a Houston school care for youth and in the process instill in them
a deeper dedication to schooling.
In addition to school-based adults, a range of outside organizations have brought new cultural
frames into schools. Some of these programs are run by nonprofits and intend to challenge the
culture of control that gives rise to harsh discipline. Others are implemented by law enforcement

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 613

officials, such as Gang Resistance Education and Training or GREAT, while others are imple-
mented by corporations. A burgeoning area of research, almost entirely outside of sociology, has
begun to explore how Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) and restorative jus-
tice (RJ) programs can change school cultures. PBIS, which had been implemented in 3,138 high
schools by 2016 (J. Freeman, Wilkinson, and Vanlone 2016), advocates changing entire systems
at the school or district level, in large part by explicitly teaching behavioral expectations, such as
respect and responsibility, in the same way that other curriculum subjects are taught (Flannery
et al. 2014). This could include proactively marking positive behaviors and clearly describing
expected behaviors in various contexts. RJ takes a different tact, as it seeks to “transform how we
think of punishment for wrongful acts” (Menkel-Meadow 2007). In schools, RJ attempts to
change how schools respond to rule violations and disputes, emphasizing building community
capacity, and repairing and strengthening social ties (Karp and Breslin 2001).
Beginning in the late 1980s, a nascent field of youth programming moved toward the promo-
tion of “positive youth development” (Catalano et al. 2004; Damon 2004; Kwon 2013). Roth and
Brooks-Gunn define positive youth development as programs [that]

seek to enhance not only adolescents’ skills, but also their confidence in themselves and their future,
their character, and their connections to other people and institutions by creating environments, both
at and away from the program, where youth can feel supported and empowered. (2003:180)

The language and framing of these programs posit them as alternatives and opposition to the
controlling, punitive, and disciplinary structures of schools in the era of crime control. Positive
youth development, alongside “health promotion” and other forms of “asset-based” models, fit
Eliasoph’s description of “empowerment projects,” which attempt to “use a complex mix of
government, nonprofit, and private funds to transform whole groups of people’s personal feelings
and sense of self, to cure them of their social ills by ‘empowering’ them” (Eliasoph 2011:4).
Empowerment, while taking varied forms (Zimmerman 1995), suggests, in sharp contrast to
crime control, that young people are inherently capable of “individual determination over one’s
own life and democratic participation in the life of one’s community” (Rappaport 1987:12).
Most research on school-based programs, much like research on schools, focuses on the
impact on students and rarely examines how facilitators or other adults navigate the school cul-
ture. The limited amount of research that does document the experiences of program implement-
ers suggests that facilitators actively navigate the space between school structures and practices
in the course of their work, but it does not explore in detail how they do so (Ball et al. 2015;
Fields 2008; Kohfeldt et al. 2011; Pearrow and Pollack 2009).
To make sense of the diverse cultural frames deployed by adults in schools, I draw on
approaches to understanding cultural heterogeneity, which has been previously used to analyze
the myriad cultural frames in marginalized urban neighborhoods (Harding 2007). In this theoreti-
cal tradition, scholars of culture suggest that individuals draw on cultural frames—distinct men-
tal schemas for viewing the world—to navigate social life (Harding 2007; Small, Harding, and
Lamont 2010; Swidler 1986). Both empowerment and control act as kinds of cultural frames in
schools. How is it that facilitators put a cultural frame of empowerment into action within the
cultural context of school discipline?

LAUSD
Los Angeles is a critical case in the study of the countervailing cultural frames of discipline and
empowerment both because of the extremity of school discipline in LAUSD at the time of this
research, and because the city and local nonprofits readily used youth programming as a signifi-
cant part of their strategy of preventing harm and promoting health among youth. LAUSD, which

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
614 Sociological Perspectives 61(4)

serves over 640,000 students, 88 percent of whom are students of color and 80 percent of whom
qualify for free or reduced lunch, has the second largest school district police department in the
country, with over 470 on-site officers and a budget of $52 million ( Freeman, Kim, and Rawson
2013). According to data collected from LAUSD and the Los Angeles Police Department
(LAPD), during the 2011–2012 school year, LAUSD police ticketed, cited, or arrested one out of
every 100 students—8,993 in total—which the Community Rights Campaign claims is among
the highest rates in the country. According to their data, 93 percent of those tickets went to black
and Latino youth (Freeman et al. 2013). In addition to the documented statistics, students in
LAUSD reported

widespread, random, and targeted searches of their person and bags, many schools going so far as to
bring drug-sniffing dogs on campus. Intimidating posturing by officers in the halls. Handcuffing in
front of peers, even for truancy. And . . . an ongoing form of profiling of the “bad” students. (Freeman
et al. 2013:16)

This expansive punitive system was paired with a limited system of support. For example, in
2013, there was one school counselor for every 1,016 students in Los Angeles schools (Freeman
et al. 2013).
Critiques of the criminal justice approach in Los Angeles, like other urban centers, aligned
with a push to bring positive, or “asset-based,” programming into the lives of youth in the most
disadvantaged neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Organizations such as the Advancement Project
and the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles have become enmeshed with the
political and institutional landscape of the city. In addition to the organization where I conducted
my fieldwork, several other organizations implemented programs with Los Angeles public school
students. While there are no comprehensive counts of youth programs in schools, there is reason
to believe that they are significant. In one analysis, Finkelhor et al. (2014) found that 65 percent
of youth in the United States had gone through the subset of programs focused on teen dating
violence, sexual assault, bullying, or gang violence. This research explores the facilitators of
programs which fit into this subset.

Data and Methods

This manuscript draws on data collected from a larger study of youth programs in Los Angeles.
From 2009 to 2013, I conducted extensive fieldwork across the programming implemented by
Peace over Violence, an antiviolence nonprofit organization in Los Angeles. A full-time staff of
eight, as well as dozens of volunteers, facilitated a range of short-term youth violence prevention
programs at schools and community centers across the city, reaching over 3,000 young people,
predominantly high school students, each year. During the course of my fieldwork, I conducted
participant observation in programming at 20 public schools across Los Angeles. Across programs
that dealt with sexuality, bullying, interpersonal violence, sexual assault, healthy masculinity, self-
care, mentorship, and oppression, I observed multiweek and semester-long programs that took
place during study halls or lunch periods, as well as intensive campus-wide one-time programs
that lasted anywhere from a day to a week. While the data discussed here were collected as an
observer, I at times facilitated portions of programs myself, so some students were familiar with
me in that capacity as well. It was common for volunteers or other facilitators to observe program-
ming, and my doing so was not out of the ordinary. During the course of my fieldwork, I did not
record identifiable information regarding students and followed the guidance and standard prac-
tices of facilitators in any ethical matter that arose. In the second year of field research, I began
conducting interviews with students. To recruit interviews, I informed students at the conclusion
of a program that I was interested in conducting interviews for a research project.

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 615

All of the observation data on students used in this manuscript were collected in high schools.
I did not have access to the ages of students, but programming was more often implemented to
first and second year students. The audiences ranged in size from five to 40 students, but most
consisted of 15 to 20 students. In addition to the interactions that took place during programming,
I observed how programs intersected with the other functions of schools, observing teachers,
administrators, and staff as they interacted with facilitators and youth participants. In addition to
my time in schools, I participated in trainings, program evaluations, and regular meetings of
facilitators and other organizational staff, during which time they discussed challenges and strat-
egies of facilitating. I jotted field notes during programming and dictated verbal field notes into
an audio recorder immediately after leaving the field. I typed detailed field notes within 24 hours
(Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). I coded field notes for emerging themes, which were devel-
oped in relation to dominant questions in the scholarship on discipline in schools—labeling,
authority, and surveillance. All names given are pseudonyms.
During the third year of participant observation I conducted in-depth, semistructured inter-
views with 11 program facilitators. These interviews ran between half an hour and two-and-a-
half hours and were conducted in breakout rooms at the organization or in coffee shops. Interview
questions regarded facilitators’ strategies for working with youth and the tensions they felt in
their work. In total, my interviews with facilitators included six women—three Latina, two black,
three white, and one Asian American—and five men—two black, two Latino, and one white.
These interviews included all of the facilitators employed at the organization during this time, as
well as two volunteer facilitators. These interviews enabled me to make sense of the differences
between the way facilitators described empowerment and how they interacted with students.
Most of the schools where youth programs are implemented are the same ones that are marked
by disadvantage and crime control approaches, as the grants that fund violence prevention pro-
grams largely focus on specific geographic communities or demographic populations seen as at
risk. The funding was provided from a mix of multiyear city, state, federal, and private grants.
The audience for programming, in line with the population of LAUSD, was almost entirely youth
of color. Only two of the 20 school sites I spent time in were populated by a majority of white
students.
To understand how facilitators navigate and respond to school discipline and control, it is
necessary to distinguish between their formal job requirements and their actions. An ethno-
graphic approach enabled me to document how programs were implemented in practice, data that
differ from what is found in evaluation studies based on surveys or interviews. By contrasting the
formal curricula with my in-situ observations, I was able to distinguish the informal practices of
facilitators from those prescribed in the program being implemented.

The Empowerment Frame

Empowerment, simply put, is a cultural frame that proposes that individuals are the best experts
on their own lives (Gengler 2012). Facilitators viewed empowerment as grounded in the orga-
nization’s roots as a feminist rape crisis agency, and it was a central component of the mission
of Peace over Violence. It was part of the organization’s mission statement and was one of the
eight core values listed on their Web site, where it stated, “Empowerment: To give power or
authority to; to enable or permit.” The word was included in job advertisements for facilitator
positions, and the empowerment frame was built in to the training that all facilitators went
through. There were debates over the best way to empower youth, and while some people sup-
ported the notion of empowerment through programming, some nonfacilitators wanted a more
radical approach. Ella, a seasoned facilitator, explained this tension: “Believe it or not, there
have been a few people here in the agency who don’t see the value of the curriculum. They don’t
necessarily feel that youth empowerment will come from the [program] implementation.” From

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
616 Sociological Perspectives 61(4)

the organization’s perspective, empowerment was used to describe a range of practices, from
implementing a curriculum, to teaching self-defense, to working on a performance, to providing
funding for participating in a summer institute. Empowered youth were described as possessing
agency, making choices, and becoming capable of change.
However, when it came time to talk about how to translate empowerment into work in schools,
facilitators were more reticent. A couple of sessions into a 50-hour training, Amy, an experienced
trainer, stressed to a room full of new facilitators that they should not put too much weight on
their work in schools: They were not going to change the system. She explained that they should
let go of the idea that we will go in and save everyone: “It’s not Stand and Deliver. It’s not our
job.” A woman trainee, clearly bothered by this narrow interpretation of facilitation asked, “If our
goal isn’t individual and it isn’t huge, then what should we be going for?” Amy responded that
the goal of in-school facilitation is to provide “a sense of agency.” This is, read one way, a power-
ful endorsement of the capacity for programming to change the way young people see them-
selves in the world. But, read another perhaps more cynical way, it shows the limits of
empowerment—a sense of agency, but not the real thing. This description by Amy is a fitting
illustration of the bind that facilitators navigated as they brought an empowerment frame into
disciplinary places. The sections that follow show how facilitators constrained and transformed
empowerment when faced with the mechanisms of the culture of control, construing empower-
ment to entail anonymity, positive labels, and symbolic equality.

Against Marking: Anonymity and Positive Labels

Teachers and administrators would often, unprompted, approach facilitators before class and tell
them that certain students were “trouble” or were “going through something.” These informal
labels were used by school officials in the presence of youth, often with the stigma of trouble and
delinquency attached. During one session with a group of “high-risk” boys, I saw how labeling
could disrupt positive interactions. Jose, a stern and funny facilitator, was leading a thoughtful
discussion about the uses of the word bitch in popular culture when a school administrator, look-
ing for a particular student who had ditched class, poked their head in, briefly surveyed the stu-
dents and exclaimed, “You’ve got all the rowdies! Good luck!” with a smirk and then took off
down the hall. Even though some students in highly policed areas may not find delinquent labels
stigmatizing (Hirschfield 2008b), many students expressed resentment and hurt at interactions
like this, and regardless of how it made them feel, labels served as powerful mechanisms for sort-
ing students (Rios 2011).
The students enrolled in youth programs were likely to have been labeled at some point. These
labels determined how various institutions engaged with them, such as the probation department,
the school administration, campus police, or school psychologist, and often set youth into narrow
prescribed tracks that organized their physical movements, educational opportunities, and access
to resources. The in-school programs implemented by Peace Over Violence enrolled youth who
had been labeled, through a variety of processes, as “at risk.” Administrators and teachers exer-
cised latitude in who was enrolled in programs. Once school administrators requested program-
ming from the organization and the organization determined the source of funding for
implementing the program, then probation officers, school counselors, teachers, and administra-
tors drew on their existing perceptions of students to decide which students would participate.
This could be an entire grade level or a small, hand-picked group. Jose explained how this pro-
cess worked for the high-risk program he facilitated. While he would receive a list of students on
probation, there were other, less clearly defined paths to being placed in the high-risk program:

They don’t necessarily end up there because they’re on probation. The probation officer could be
working with counselors or the principals within those schools and say, “Hey, this kid, or this young

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 617

woman or man, they might need some type of extracurricular education on violence.” Then they
come into his or her caseload, and then my list therefore expands.

Jose’s expanding list is evidence of how school officials not only used formal marking by institu-
tions and officials to enroll youth in programs, such as being on probation, but also informal
labeling, such as “needing” education on violence, due to perceptions of aggression, defiance, or
trauma.
Drawing on the empowerment frame, facilitators believed that this kind of labeling would not
only stigmatize, but constrain students and that challenging labeling practices was central to their
work to empower youth. While school officials used informal and formal labels regularly, includ-
ing as a means to enroll students in youth programming, I never observed facilitators using stig-
matizing labels or institutional markings with students. Instead, facilitators used strategies, which
they shared and enacted cooperatively, to avoid both formal and informal labels. No matter the
size of the implementation, if students asked what the program was about, facilitators would
often explain their role as helping young people to become leaders and develop the tools to have
healthy relationships. This was rather than describe it as violence prevention, which was their
official job and how they described their work to teachers and administrators.
In addition, most facilitators, quite simply, refused to say labels out loud. Take for example,
Jose’s explanation of how he views youth differently from the way they are viewed by school
officials:

I don’t come there labeling, I don’t come there with my biases, I don’t come there like, “Oh, I need
to bring a gun,” or, “I need to protect myself,” or, “Is he going to jump me because he has tattoos?”
No, if anything, I see them as young kids. They’re really kids. Maybe they did stuff wrong, but that
doesn’t mean that that label should be put on their foreheads, and that’s it. Their label in society is
“probation youth” or “high-risk kids.” I don’t even see that. I see them as first-name basis, so I know
them as “Oscar,” “Michele.” Whatever their names are, I want to see them as that.

As Jose makes clear, he resisted labeling by ignoring the very labels that framed his work and
instead referred to the youth as individuals. However, despite Jose’s description, facilitators
rarely knew students’ names. This was due in part to the overwhelming volume of youth they
encountered in programming, as well as poor communication from overworked school staff who
sometimes failed to provide a list of enrolled students. But, even when they had a list of student
names, facilitators rarely took attendance. Many facilitators described feeling resentment for
their responsibility to pass around a sign-in sheet, actively downplaying in front of students its
importance even though it was central to their evaluations.
Across all of my interviews, even though they were caught up in an extensive system of
labeling, most youth had never heard the term at risk and most of those who had heard the term
were confused by its meaning. When I asked Hendrix, a Latino student at a small high school,
whether he had heard the label before, he responded, “I mean, I haven’t heard it a lot, but I know
what it means . . . It means, like, something that’s, like, you’re walking on eggshells pretty
much.” To Hendrix, “at risk” meant something like being afraid of what others might do. None
of the students I interviewed thought of themselves as at risk. In one representative class of
students, when asked why they had been selected to participate in a program, they variously
described their enrollment as retribution for a disagreement with a teacher, a therapeutic inter-
vention suggested by a counselor for a personal issue, or a demonstration of their role as a
campus leader. While these rationales alluded to various relationships with authority, they all
implied that youth participants made some choice to attend and none of them served to attach
lasting stigma to youth participants.
Facilitators did not avoid the “at risk” label because they believed that it was incorrect. In fact,
in conversations outside of programming, in organizational meetings and interviews, facilitators

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
618 Sociological Perspectives 61(4)

described most of the youth they worked with were at risk in that they were likely to experience
or engage in violence. Ella told me, “in the communities I’ve worked with, every single [youth]
is high-risk just because of the environment that we live in.” I asked if she just meant high risk
for violence, and she responded, “At risk for anything, drug use, alcohol, pregnancy. It’s overall
just high-risk.” Sean, who had worked with homeless veterans before taking this position,
explained how he responded to the idea that the students he worked with were at risk:

[My supervisor was] like, “we work with the future victims and the future perpetrators.” For me,
when I heard that the first time, I was like, “Damn, that is so harsh,” but it’s very true Because I work
in prevention, those labels don’t exist yet and I’m able to see everybody with the same, if you will,
naked eye, where everyone’s just pretty much across the board same, even though statistically I know
I’m looking at future victims and future perpetrators, but because they’re not labeled, there’s no
discrimination that’s happening across the board.

Sean’s perspective echoes what I heard from facilitators and youth alike—while the statistical
reality of risk was present due to what one facilitator described as their “disturbed geography” of
marginalization and violence, avoiding labels enabled them to avoid constructing difference and
thereby denying a group of young people who were already marginalized and criminalized by
labeling the ability to determine their own identities.
Rather than use proper names or stigmatizing labels, facilitators attempted to reframe students
by attaching positive labels. Similar to the findings described by Eliasoph (2011) concerning
community empowerment projects, facilitators not only avoided constraining labels by referring
to students as “y’all” and “folks,” but they actively repeated informal positive labels such as “the
future,” “leaders,” and “change agents.” John and Arianna, both of whom are Latino, described
the positive feeling they got from how they were treated in programming compared with how
they were labeled in their daily lives:

John: At [the program] they look at us as role models. And yet, when you’re outside of that,
you’re already stereotyped. You’re already, they already look at you as that Latino or black
guy or girl.
Arianna: At [the program] they see us as more of the future. So, they could educate us on
violence and then we could grow up and help others, like, educate them.
John: And outside they look at us as the next kid in prison, [or] working at a fast-food
restaurant.

As John and Arianna show, facilitators often succeeded in providing alternatives to the discursive
mechanisms that typically conferred informal labels on youth. As John stated, students believed
that most adults in schools often label them in ways that constrain their choices, but that facilita-
tors do not. In doing so, facilitators temporarily uncoupled the discursive stigma of labels from
the institutional mechanisms that used labels to mark and sort youth. That is, while facilitators
provided positive alternative labels, they also obscured how school officials had attached labels
to specific individuals to sort youth into the program.

Against Authority: Performative Leveling

In most of the schools where violence prevention programs were implemented, the spread of
crime control was clear: Police walked the halls, small acts were documented as willful defiance,
and school officials threatened detention or expulsion for minor infractions. Rob, a tall, white
facilitator with close-cropped hair who was often asked by students whether he was a police
officer, described how he saw the impact of crime control policies on the work of facilitation:
“We are invited in to classrooms where kids are basically prisoners, so we get to talk to

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 619

the prisoners.” Rob’s point echoes one made by research that has shown that urban schools are
constructed in ways that parallel prisons and deprive students of valuable avenues for “a sense of
ownership over the self” (Nolan 2011:16).
Within the strict disciplinary authority of the school, facilitators saw few avenues to increase
the power and autonomy of students. They could not, for example, give students power to make
institutional or classroom decisions. Students had to complete their assignments, show up for
class, and generally follow rules that they had no say in. Instead, the empowerment frame, within
the context of school discipline, led facilitators to symbolically lower their own status and author-
ity and curb the interactional mechanisms that often tracked students into disciplinary action.
Facilitators set out to manage the classroom in a way that was dramatically different from
disciplinary and rule-driven operation of “regular” classes, often maintained through hand-raising
and threats of “being sent down the hall.” Facilitators managed classroom interactions using what
they called the empowerment model, which was “based on choice” as Eleanor, a young and
compassionate facilitator, explained:

Giving individuals the options and then letting them decide what they want to do . . . We don’t want
to further victimize them in a sense, because if we’re making decisions for them or coming up with
the solutions then we’re taking that power away from them. They’ve already had this power and
control taken away from them so we want to empower them by giving them those options and those
resources.

As Eleanor’s description shows, facilitators were critical of the authoritarian rules of the school
and believed that it victimized students and stripped them of their autonomy. Facilitators believed
that providing options and openness to students created a model of resistance to the school rules,
and returned some “power and control” to students.
The daily work of facilitation took place in classrooms, where teachers or other school offi-
cials were often present and the threat of punishment loomed over most interactions, even while
punitive discipline itself was rarely enacted there. During a presentation on the meaning of con-
sent, Jennifer, a young facilitator, set out to model empowerment to several students who were
furiously jotting notes, stating, “you don’t need to take notes, we aren’t going to make you do
anything you don’t want to.” The teacher, a man with gray hair who had been grading papers
quietly to the side, interjected, undermining Jennifer: “I do want you to take notes, there will be
a quiz and you will get points for it.” Jennifer, without any grounds on which to challenge the
teacher, relinquished her attempt to put her lesson on consent into action and continued with the
unit. Interactions like this revealed how the school, premised on rewards and rules, contrasted
with empowerment, which centered on equality and consent. When teachers used their authority
in the classroom, as this teacher had, from requiring note taking to threatening expulsion, most
youth performed more obediently as “good” students, taking notes and waiting to be called on.
Facilitators found raising hands, alongside note taking, to be a particularly frustrating practice,
and they often encouraged students to “treat this like a conversation” and “speak up.” For these
reasons, facilitators often hoped that teachers would leave the room for their lessons, even though
most schools had rules that required them to stay in a supervisory capacity.
The punitive power of the school was most apparent when students, predominantly young
men, disrupted programming. This happened on dozens of occasions. I observed students call out
“bullshit” during presentations and advocate that sexual assault was justifiable or enjoyable.
Others put their heads down on their desks, swung their backpacks at friends, or abruptly walked
in and out of the room. Often, if teachers were present, they would threaten students who acted
out in class with detention or punishment. I never saw a facilitator send a student to the office or
threaten punishment. Facilitators prided themselves on not resorting to disciplinary measures and
they worked to de-escalate and redirect these events. Often, they did this by pulling the student
in to the center of the discussion. One young man, wiry with long dark hair, was drumming his

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
620 Sociological Perspectives 61(4)

thumbs loudly against his desk and humming early on in a presentation. The teacher, seemingly
hoping to head off other disruptive behavior, said the young man’s name, gave a look, and pointed
outside. A few minutes later, he and the teacher came back in, but after a couple of minutes, he
stood up and began walking around the room. The facilitator, Jennifer, quickly engaged with him,
asking what he thought of what they were talking about, and she followed every answer up with
another question. The young man, disarmed by the engagement, settled back into his chair and
did not disrupt the class again.
Facilitators described their position as nonauthorities as vital to their ability to connect with
young people and avoid feeling the brunt of any oppositional stance. During a segment on warn-
ing signs of violence several sessions into a multiweek program, Stephanie, a young and dynamic
facilitator asked me to participate. One of the students, overhearing this, said “oh good, an
expert.” Reflexively, I responded, “No, I’m not an expert,” and Sarah, another facilitator jumped
in to say, “None of us are experts.” The young man, catching on, nodded and said, “We’re all
experts.” Sarah responded, “Yes, we’re all experts,” while Stephanie nodded. The young man had
picked up on the empowerment frame.
However, because of their position as school-sanctioned outsiders, facilitators came into the
classroom with undeniable authority even though they told students that “we are all equal” and
“no one here should have more authority than others.” Joe, the youngest facilitator, for example,
often began class by clapping his palms together and repeating “Good morning” until every stu-
dent faced forward and echoed him back. Then he said “stand up,” and with a slow groan the
students would rise; “okay, sit down,” he said to more groans. Even though he had not shown a
capacity to discipline or punish students, all of the students followed Joe’s command.
It took a delicate balancing act for facilitators to maintain control of the classroom, as their job
required, and to create empowerment at the same time. I asked Jose, a facilitator who had spent
time in the military, how he managed to create what he called an “open and safe space” for stu-
dents while making sure that students listened to the required educational content. He told me,

It is tricky . . . I’m there to be a friend, and I’m there to be someone who empowers you, but also I
have some authority on what I’m saying, therefore, like, “Hey, let’s listen up, because maybe you can
carry this and you might learn something.”

For facilitators, unlike many teachers, their class management techniques were just as impor-
tant as the material. They saw their interactions with students as opportunities to provide a model
of empowerment that countered the hierarchical authority of the school. For this reason, facilita-
tors spent considerable time and effort honing their classroom management. Take for example
this excerpt from my field notes on a training session for volunteers in which Ida, a seasoned
facilitator, described she would “shift the focus” of interactions in the classroom to “guide the
audience towards the answers” without taking away their power and choice:

Ida explains that an answer that is technically correct, but doesn’t contribute to the lesson is written
and validated—you say “that is a really good one” and don’t return to it. When someone calls out an
answer that she wants to hear, Ida says “good, say more about that.” She describes this as “putting it
back on them.” She explains, “one of my strategies is to say ‘what else?’ and then pause and then I
say it [the answer], I know I’m going to say it. It is a way of controlling the audience.” Then, Ida
explains how to “work them around” a disruptive or “tricky” response. For example, in response to
the question “what is a healthy relationship?” students might say “being protective.” Ida though,
concerned that protection is aligned with control suggests a response “Those can be good things:
protection, safety, but jealousy means that there isn’t respect.”

Ida’s advice reveals the practice of “controlling the audience” by validating answers and opening
up conversation and discussion around disruptive remarks. That facilitators viewed these

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 621

strategies as a form of empowerment shows how the larger culture of control served to constrain
their options.
Facilitators felt that students should always be encouraged to answer and feel that their con-
tribution was appreciated. Facilitators saw this validation as a vital antidote to the way youth
were often invalidated by adult authorities in school and beyond. Rob explained that young men
“say stupid things and if you react to that, you are going to put them on shut down.” Rob referred
to the strategies that he used in response to these comments as “management styles.” He explained
that students

can talk for four minutes. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds of what they say is complete
bullshit and stupid. Then they can say twenty-five seconds of something that is smart, and I’m not
going to say oh man, you crazy. I’m going to zero in on that twenty-five seconds and say I really
appreciate that.

“Sitting in the ignorance,” as Rob called his 25-second strategy, was easy to do when students
gave incorrect, albeit apparently well-intentioned answers, but it was more difficult when they
gave responses that challenged the program’s empowerment goals. This included bizarre
responses that may or may not have been jokes at the presenters’ expense, and racist, sexist,
homophobic, or otherwise troubling responses. In those cases, facilitators, rather than challenge
students, actively and knowingly reframed what students said to represent a positive message. In
one class, a student suggested going to TGIFridays with a survivor of domestic violence to cheer
them up. As most of the students chuckled, the facilitator responded by saying, “Yes, you could
spend time with them and support your friend.” Validation, as this facilitator showed, avoided
proclaiming answers right or wrong while not allowing a potentially tense interaction to sidetrack
the lesson.
Facilitators also leveled authority in the classroom by creating class “ground rules” on the first
day of a series of lessons. The facilitator would ask the class “do we have any ideas for ground
rules?” and write the answers on a ream of newsprint. Facilitators would also offer their own addi-
tions, as though they were part of the group: “What about ‘don’t interrupt,’ do we think that’s a
good idea?” The specifics varied by class, but many rules came up consistently: step up, no vio-
lence, be respectful, be honest, and let others finish. Facilitators and youth did not pick these rules
at random; they chose them out of a shared interest in discouraging aspects of the larger culture of
control, marked from their perspective by blame, aggression, dishonesty, and competition. For
example, when asked why he had suggested “be respectful,” one student replied that his teacher
had been disrespectful of him. The ground-rules process worked through a performance of con-
sensus. Facilitators could ask for ideas and then wrote only the ones they wanted on the board and
excluded or asked for ways to revise ones they did not like. If a student acted out later in the pro-
gram, implementers would point to the “ground rules” and say, “We all agreed.” Ground rules,
along with selectively emphasizing and downplaying student involvement, was used by facilita-
tors to frame the classroom as a site of empowerment, at the same time that they used those strate-
gies to manage disruptions and dissent without involving the disciplinary apparatus of the school.

Discussion and Conclusion

Existing literature emphasizes the broad culture of control in schools and portrays schools, at
times, as nearly indistinguishable from prisons (Hirschfield 2008). However, culture operates at
various levels and previous research has overlooked the heterogeneous, often conflicting, cul-
tural frames carried by adults in schools (Harding 2007). This article has shown how facilitators
of youth programs modified the cultural frame of empowerment in response to the culture of
control in disciplinary schools (Eliasoph 2011).

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
622 Sociological Perspectives 61(4)

Cultural frames are not applied in a vacuum (Harding 2007). While empowerment functioned
as an alternative cultural frame, control remained the dominant organizing cultural frame in
schools, as it was deeply embedded in norms, beliefs, and institutional practices. Thus, facilita-
tors enacted a frame of empowerment that fit within, and thus was distinctly circumscribed by,
control. This meant that the empowerment frame looked very different in schools than it did in
the context of the organization. Within the harsh disciplinary contexts of schools, facilitators put
empowerment into action as intentional and shared opposition to two mechanisms of the domi-
nant culture of control: the marking of at risk or troublesome youth and disciplinary authority
over in-class behavior. When they engaged with students, facilitators, carrying out their belief in
empowerment as they saw it and as they were able to from their distinct position, consistently
used individualizing and anonymizing language, as well as positive labels. In doing so, they
eased the sting of stigmatizing marks typically attached to students in urban schools and pre-
sented students with alternative ways of thinking about themselves in relation to the school. The
result was that youth were constructed as “the future” rather than “at risk.” This had a positive
impact on young people’s self-concept, temporarily changing the way that young people saw
themselves. However, young people were still sorted and tracked by the school largely outside of
their view.
In addition, facilitators, unable to empower students within the strict hierarchy of the school,
adapted how they defined empowerment. They brought behavior that would often be viewed as
disruptive and was likely to be sanctioned in the course of regular classroom activity into the
realm of shared discussion and analysis in the program context. Facilitators worked to avoid any
negative critiques of youth contributions and practiced a strategy for managing students through
symbolically leveled classroom authority. These strategies undermined the interactional mecha-
nisms that can otherwise push students toward punitive discipline (Nolan 2011; Rios 2011).
This helped to counter the normalization of a culture of control among students and instead sent
young people the message that schools can support their empowerment, albeit in a circum-
scribed manner.
In addition to being limited and redefined, this research suggests that alternative cultural
frames, when situated within a larger culture of control, may have unintended consequences.
Although it had short-term benefits for individual students, we should be wary of the implica-
tions of short-term empowerment in disciplinary places. When facilitators moved on and when
students left the classroom, youth remained in the same disciplinary school, subject to the same
culture of control. Students who come to take on the empowerment frame, and perhaps see them-
selves as a future leader, may be brought low when a teacher or administrator tells them they are
bound for prison. Students who try to treat their interactions with a harsh administrator as a con-
versation between equals may be seen as disrespectful. In short, empowered students may be
more likely to be disciplined.
This research suggests that cultural frames are not seamlessly transferred from outside orga-
nizations into students’ heads. Instead, cultural frames are made sense of, shifted, and enacted by
social actors and in relation to one another. In the case of many urban schools, alternative cultural
frames are enacted within an overarching culture of disciplinary control. Therefore, new frames
carried by adults—and likely youth—into schools can not only challenge, but also be subsumed
within the culture of control. This research suggests that other frames which set out to transform
school cultures—such as RJ, PBIS, health promotion, or antibullying—will interact with the
overarching culture of control as well. Research must consider both the cultural frame that is
brought into schools, and how it is transformed as it interacts with the overarching culture of
control. For example, PBIS uses a cultural frame that largely hinges on clearly defining the
behavioral rules and norms of a school, and RJ programs deploy a frame that centers reconcilia-
tion and rehabilitation. These distinct cultural frames surely both challenge and are constrained
by the culture of control.

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 623

In addition to complimenting sociological research on the culture of control in schools, this

research also suggests a gap in evaluative scholarship on in-school programs. Previous research
conceives of facilitators as direct conduits between the curriculum and the minds of students and
ignores how facilitators decide how to engage with the organizational apparatus and the cultural
frames of the school. The actions of facilitators—and presumably their efficacy—are more com-
plicated than previous research allows, as facilitators must navigate cultural dynamics beyond
the narrow implementation of the formal program, including school discipline, labeling, class-
room management, and more.
This study provides a qualitative account of the practices used by program facilitators within
one urban school district, and thus, has several limitations. First, the practices which I illuminate
are shaped by the particular aspects of both local school policies and the particular culture of the
nonprofit organization that employed these facilitators. In addition, scholarship on school disci-
pline suggests that race (Ferguson 2001), class (Willis 1977), and gender (Ferguson 2001; Rios
2011) are dimensions of the operation of control in schools. Further research should explore
intersectional implications of empowerment programs in practice. It is not clear, from a focus
on facilitators alone, how students experience and take up this enactment of empowerment. We
know that many students seek dignity, freedom, or anonymity in response to harsh school disci-
pline (Oeur 2016; Rios 2011), but it is not clear whether empowerment would bolster those
goals or undermine them. Empowerment, as practiced by facilitators, values anonymity, not
name-making; performative leveling, not equality; dignity, not freedom. But what this means to
students depends, in large part, on whether they perceive programs as part of or oppositional to
the school. Further research should explore these questions, along with how adults, drawing on
diverse cultural frames, manage their approaches within the context of school discipline. In
particular, PBIS and RJ, which have seen widespread implementation and which rely on frames
that are distinct from empowerment, deserve further research to determine how facilitators rec-
oncile their beliefs and values with the culture of control in schools.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References
Arum, Richard. 2005. Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Ball, B., A. T. Tharp, R. K. Noonan, L. A. Valle, M. E. Hamburger, and B. Rosenbluth. 2015. “Implementing
a Targeted Teen Dating Abuse Prevention Program: Challenges and Successes Experienced by Expect
Respect Facilitators.” Journal of Adolescent Health 56(2):S40–S46.
Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 2nd ed.
London, England: Sage Publications.
Bracy, Nicole L. 2011. “Student Perceptions of High-security School Environments.” Youth & Society
43(1):365–95.
Brayne, Sarah. 2014. “Surveillance and System Avoidance: Criminal Justice Contact and Institutional
Attachment.” American Sociological Review 79(3):367–91.
Catalano, Richard F., M. Lisa Berglund, Jean A. M. Ryan, Heather S. Lonczak, and J. David Hawkins.
2004. “Positive Youth Development in the United States: Research Findings on Evaluations of
Positive Youth Development Programs.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 591(1):98–124.

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
624 Sociological Perspectives 61(4)

Cruikshank, Barbara. 1999. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Damon, William. 2004. “What Is Positive Youth Development?” The ANNALS of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 591(1):13–24.
Durkheim, Emile. 1961. Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of
Education. New York: Free Press.
Eliasoph, Nina. 2011. Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago,
IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Ferguson, Ann Arnett. 2001. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Fields, Jessica. 2008. Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Finkelhor, D., J. Vanderminder, H. Turner, A. Shattuck, and S. Hamby. 2014. “Youth Exposure to Violence
Prevention Programs in a National Sample.” Child Abuse & Neglect 38(4):677–86.
Flannery, K. B., P. Fenning, M. M. Kato, and K. McIntosh. 2014. “Effects of School-wide Positive
Behavioral Interventions and Supports and Fidelity of Implementation on Problem Behavior in High
Schools.” School Psychology Quarterly 29:111–24.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Freeman, J., S. Wilkinson, and J. Vanlone. 2016. Status of High School PBIS Implementation in the U.S.
Retrieved October 30, 2017 (PBIS.org).
Freeman, Jim, Daniel Kim, and Zoe Rawson. 2013. Black, Brown, and Over-policed in L.A. Schools.
Community Rights Campaign of the Labor/Community Strategy Center. Los Angeles, CA.
Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Gengler, Amanda M. 2012. “Defying (Dis)Empowerment in a Battered Women’s Shelter: Moral Rhetorics,
Intersectionality, and Processes of Control and Resistance.” Social Problems 59(4):501–21.
Gilmore, Ruthie W. 2007. “In the Shadow of the Shadow State.” Pp. 41–52 in The Revolution Will Not
Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color against
Violence. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Hagan, John, Carla Shedd, and Monique R. Payne. 2005. “Race, Ethnicity, and Youth Perceptions of
Criminal Justice.” American Sociological Review 70(3):381–407.
Harding, David J. 2007. “Cultural Context, Sexual Behavior, and Romantic Relationships in Disadvantaged
Neighborhoods.” American Sociological Review 72(3):341–64.
Hirschfield, Paul J. 2008a. “Preparing for Prison? The Criminalization of School Discipline in the USA.”
Theoretical Criminology 12(1):79–101.
Hirschfield, Paul J. 2008b. “The Declining Significance of Delinquent Labels in Disadvantaged Urban
Communities.” Sociological Forum 23(3):575–601.
Holland, Megan M. 2015. “Trusting Each Other: Student-counselor Relationships in Diverse High Schools.”
Sociology of Education 88(3):244–62.
Kang-Brown, Jacob, Jennifer Trone, Jennifer Fratello, and Tarika Daftary-Kapur. 2013. A Generation
Later: What We’ve Learned about Zero Tolerance in Schools. Vera Institute of Justice.New York, NY.
Karp, D. and B. Breslin. 2001. “Restorative Justice in School Communities.” Youth & Society 33:249–72.
Kirk, Chris Michael, R. Lewis, K. Brown, B. Karibo, A. Scott, E. Park. 2017. “The Empowering Schools
Project: Identifying the Classroom and School Characteristics That Lead to Student Empowerment.”
Youth & Society 49:827–47.
Kohfeldt, Danielle, Lina Chhun, Sarah Grace, and Regina Day Langhout. 2011. “Youth Empowerment in
Context: Exploring Tensions in School-based yPAR.” American Journal of Community Psychology
47(1–2):28–45.
Kupchik, Aaron. 2012. Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear. New York: New York
University Press.
Kupchik, Aaron and Thomas J. Catlaw. 2015. “Discipline and Participation: The Long-term Effects of
Suspension and School Security on the Political and Civic Engagement of Youth.” Youth & Society
47(1):95–124.

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Greenberg 625

Kupchik, Aaron and Geoff Ward. 2014. “Race, Poverty, and Exclusionary School Security: An Empirical
Analysis of U.S. Elementary, Middle, and High Schools.” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
12(4):332–54.
Kwon, Soo Ah. 2013. Uncivil Youth: Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Losen, Daniel J. and Jonathan Gillespie. 2012. Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of
Disciplinary Exclusion from School. The Civil Rights Project. Retrieved July 12, 2015 (http://eschol-
arship.org/uc/item/3g36n0c3.pdf).
Lyons, William Thomas and Julie Drew. 2006. Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American
Public Education. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Menkel-Meadow, Carrie. 2007. “Restorative Justice: What Is It and Does It Work?” Annual Review of Law
and Social Science 3(1):161–87.
Morris, Edward W. 2005. “‘Tuck in That Shirt!’ Race, Class, Gender, and Discipline in an Urban School.”
Sociological Perspectives 48(1):25–48.
Nolan, Kathleen M. 2011a. “Oppositional Behavior in Urban Schooling: Toward a Theory of Resistance for
New Times.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 24(5):559–72.
Nolan, Kathleen M. 2011b. Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Oeur, Freeden. 2016. “Recognizing Dignity Young Black Men Growing Up in an Era of Surveillance.”
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. 2:1-15.
Pearrow, Melissa M. and Stanley Pollack. 2009. “Youth Empowerment in Oppressive Systems: Opportunities
for School Consultants.” Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation 19(1):45–60.
Perry, Brea L. and Edward W. Morris. 2014. “Suspending Progress: Collateral Consequences of Exclusionary
Punishment in Public Schools.” American Sociological Review 79(6):1067–87.
Prus, Robert. 2011. “Examining Community Life ‘in the Making’: Emile Durkheim’s Moral Education.”
The American Sociologist 42(1):56–111.
Ramey, David M. 2015. “The Social Structure of Criminalized and Medicalized School Discipline.”
Sociology of Education 88(3):181–201.
Rappaport, Julian. 1987. “Terms of Empowerment/Exemplars of Prevention: Toward a Theory for
Community Psychology.” American Journal of Community Psychology 15(2):121–48.
Rios, Victor M. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York
University Press.
Roth, Jodie L. and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. 2003. “Youth Development Programs: Risk, Prevention and
Policy.” Journal of Adolescent Health 32(3):170–82.
Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. 1972. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Knopf.
Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American
Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Small, M. L., D. J. Harding, and M. Lamont. 2010. “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty.” The ANNALS of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629(1):6–27.
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51:273–86.
Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Welch, Kelly and Allison Ann Payne. 2010. “Racial Threat and Punitive School Discipline.” Social
Problems 57(1):25–48.
Willis, Paul E. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Zimmerman, Marc A. 1995. “Psychological Empowerment: Issues and Illustrations.” American Journal of
Community Psychology 23(5):581–99.

Author Biography
Max A. Greenberg is a lecturer in the department of sociology at Boston University. He is the co-author of
Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women. He is working on a book
that explores violence prevention programs in Los Angeles schools.

This content downloaded from

86.59.13.237 on Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms