Jajuna

This is the introduction to a book chapter I was working on. I ended up ditching it and doing something else. I might come back it at a later time.

Contemporary life is punctuated by a variety of seemingly interminable forms of insecurity. Economic instability, proliferating anxieties over the self and the Other, eroded social safety nets, permanent war, and a looming environmental apocalypse all mark an encroaching political-economy of risk and uncertainty. To borrow a well-worn neologism from Ulrich Beck, we increasingly inhabit a “risk society” marked by an ever expanding constellation of ontological fears both real and imagined. In turn, new insecurities give way to new geographies and technologies of risk management and social control from the high-tech fortification of domestic life to the heightened policing of public spaces, institutions, and marginalized populations. In an atomized political culture dominated by commercial concerns and values, shared public responsibility for security collapses into private, corporate-led technocratic solutions and expanded law enforcement powers. The central danger born from this cycle of risk and control is the suffocating pressure it exerts on the critical and imaginative resources necessary to question and thereby collectively address the underlying systemic causes of human insecurity and suffering.

This climate of expediency and fear has enabled a culture of control to take root in public education. In recent years, school systems across the United States have turned to the corporate and criminal justice sectors in order to ostensibly make schools “safe”. This has meant the adoption of new risk management strategies and enormous outlays of public capital on CCTV cameras, ID card systems, metal detectors, biometric scanners, drug and weapons sweeps, armed security police, zero tolerance policies, and lock-down procedures. To get a sense of scale, today, 79% of all US school districts are now wired with surveillance cameras, with many cameras, such as in the Chicago Public Schools, directly monitored from police stations. Since the year 2000, the Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Service (‘COPS’) has freed up as much as $350 million dollars annually to place armed police in schools. The New York City Public Schools now have more police patrolling the halls than the total number of officers in the Boston Police Department. These trends represent an unprecedented incursion of state power into public schools precisely at a time when commitments to equitable distributions in resources are being eclipsed by attempts to restructure education through market reforms and corporate governing strategies.

School securitization is generally presented as a politically neutral and/or inevitable response to various imminent threats. However, the securitization of educational environments needs to be understood as symptomatic of a shift away from the material and ethical referents of social democracy and toward the austere mechanisms of the corporate state. This is marked by rampant commercialization/privatization, public disinvestment, the precaritization of work, and the expansion of economic and sociopolitical inequalities. As David Garland has observed, the “insecure character of today’s social and economic circumstances becomes the social surface that gives rise to our newly emphatic, overreaching concern with control and to the urgency with which we segregate, fortify, and exclude.” This intensive desire for control extends into public education through pervasive insecurities over youth. On the one hand, the securitization of education is presented as necessary to protect children from various perils. In this narrative, youth are imagined as under siege predominately from dangerous “Others”: terrorists, pedophiles, pandemic viruses, and criminals. Here, school securitization provides a means to assuage the anxieties of parents and to fulfill the needs of policy makers for “order, efficiency, and predictability in an increasingly complex, scary, and fragmented social world.” On the other hand, in the corporate media, television, and films, youth, particularly working class and minority youth, are often presented as morally corrupt and predatory. These “folk devils” of popular imagination work to legitimate “enhanced” practices of discipline and punishment in schools as well as the suspension of civil rights for youth.

Seizing on these trends is a corporate security industry – currently one of the fastest growing commercial sectors in the US. Education has become a particularly hot market for security firms as school orders now frequently outstrip sales to prisons and airports. According to Jim Dodrei of Texas based Garret Metal Detectors,

we never dreamed there would be markets in schools. Now its the largest-selling segment of our business…three or four years ago we would hear parents saying, ‘We do not want metal detectors. It looks like a prison’ now they are demanding a safe environment.

Clamoring for more “safety”, parents, administrators, and politicians have come to increasingly rely on the corporate sector/media for defining and providing the “expert” knowledge and technology of school security. Christopher Robbins has recently written that as “safety is reified as a commodity, schools can never have enough safety.” Within a rush to the corporate sphere, educational environments are only thought to be made “safe” after the “security industry organizes the visual field…in ways that permit a persistent redefinition of what “safer” means, what devices promote the next level of safety, and who is seen as a threat.” Within neoliberal culture, school “safety” comes to signal a material and immaterial process of affective labor: a making “safe” for the consumption of security commodities and the securitization of schools and youth.

The corporate media and private security industry consistently mobilize fear in order to promote an agenda of securitization in public education. In particular, narratives of “child protection” and “child demonization” have come to define the school safety debate. This chapter explores the tensions within this discursive framing particularly as it reveals a symbiosis between commercialization and various embodied and sociopolitical states of exceptionality. I suggest that this has three primary consequences: (1) it enriches and empowers the security and law enforcement industry at the expense of the public (2) it obscures forms of structural violence which create and sustain insecurities in the educational system and in the lives of youth more broadly; (3) lastly, it normalizes a culture of risk and control in public education which delimits the conditions of possibility for conceiving security within social rather than militaristic terms. What is crucially needed is a reconnection of risk and security to questions of public responsibility, investment, and justice. Ultimately, a new ethics of safety must be cultivated through substantive commitments to social advancement, human agency, and equity.

 As reported by the New York Times today, the U.S. Army has unveiled one of its newest recruitment tools. Nestled within the rows of faltering corporate retail at a Philadelphia mall can be found the new Army Experience Center. These high-tech $13 million dollar video arcades come complete with mock-up Black hawk helicopters with M4 carbine assault riffles, armored humvees with mounted 50 caliber guns, and Apache warships. Set within over 14,000 square feet of retail space, the Experience Center delivers its pro-Army message through the digital realism of huge flat screen televisions and thundering sound systems. 

According to the Times article, the experience centers have been contracted in an attempt to bolster recruitment in urban areas where enlistment numbers have been particularly hard hit in the wake of the Iraq war. One officer stationed at the center described it as “a learning lab for the military, a way for us to interact with kids and find out what they’re interested in”. While he claims that the centers represent nothing less than an innocent site for the marketing of the Army, the fact that the experience center in Philadelphia represents the formal consolidation of all five area recruitment stations into one, belies its aggressive agenda. Clearly, the logic is that urban youth, enticed by the free video games, may stick around long enough to check out the enlistment literature and to hear a sales pitch or two from recruitment officers.

This represents a new low in the U.S. Army’s public relations and enlistment tactics in the post- 9/11 era. The experience centers are the newest in a series of recruitment strategies unveiled by the Army in recent years aimed directly at children. These include new marketing promotions like the “Army Strong” campaign, home and internet video games, and a more robust online presence complete with music videos and other interactive media. What these strategies all have in common is a highly stylized and technologically mediated attempt to capture the imaginations of children, preying upon their desires for adventure, responsibility, and educational and occupational opportunity.

In the process these recruitment strategies purposefully hide the harsh realities of war and U.S Army life behind the cheap thrills of graphic violence and the empty heroism of patriotic theme music. Lost is any reference to the human suffering inflicted by U.S. imperialism either historically or in the disastrous and destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lost is any sense of the realities facing veterans as they are forced to wage shameful bureaucratic struggles in order to make good on the educational and medical benefits promised them. The fact that the new recruitment arcades have been concocted specifically to hook urban youth makes this lack of transparency just that much more appalling. In light of decades of public disinvestment, racial marginalization, and shrinking employment opportunities low-income urban youth face an especially challenging present-future. The dishonest and unethical recruitment practices embodied by the Army’s experience center add yet another unfortunate layer of social contempt these youth must negotiate.