Gendered Antiblackness in Practice: Exploring Black Students' Resistance to School Policing and Surveillance in Two Cities

Re'Nyqua Farrington

My dissertation is a multisite case study that explores Black former high school students' experiences with policing and surveillance in their previous high schools in two metropolitan areas—Atlanta and Los Angeles—in the 2010s and the 2020s respectively. I embrace gendered antiblackness and Black Critical Theory as two critical frameworks with explicit abolitionist orientations. Through archival materials, interviews, and focus groups I explore how Black students have been targeted by school police, security, and surveillance processes and technologies. In an ongoing political climate strife with racialized policing, increased surveillance, and detainment, my research follows legacies of Black student resistance and reminds us of the urgency of refusal and protest, and how both can act as ruptures to societies structured by antiblackness.

About Re'Nyqua Farrington

Re'Nyqua Farrington is a Ph.D. candidate in Education, Society, and Culture at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on investigating and disrupting the antiblack and carceral logics that underlie U.S. schooling, which create sites of violence for Black students. Re'Nyqua's experiences attending and student teaching at predominately Black public schools in the U.S. South shapes her research interests and guides her commitments to humanizing research that honors the shared needs between her and her collaborators. Her work is situated within Black studies, carceral studies, and education. When she's not freedom-dreaming about a better world, you can find Re'Nyqua lost in a book, trying new recipes in the kitchen, or creating an itinerary for her next trip.