Morrill and Musheno take readers into a multiethnic and multiracial, high-poverty school in the U.S. Southwest to demonstrate how youth handle peer “trouble,” which they define as interpersonal and institutional conflict. Using 16 years of ethnographic fieldwork, Morrill and Musheno investigate the social structures at New West High School (NWHS) that enable youth to peacefully handle conflict in the midst of conditions which, in other, similarly situated communities, tend to lead to violence (Reference DevineDevine 1996; Reference RiosRios 2011; Reference Sanchez-JankowskiSanchez-Jankowski 1991). Importantly, this work demonstrates that ethnic and racial diversity in predominantly poor school communities does not inevitably cultivate social distrust or violent peer conflict.
The longitudinal component in this study makes this work truly exceptional. Data for this project includes thousands of pages of observational fieldnotes and analytic memos, interviews, youth-authored trouble cases, surveys, focus groups, archival data, student-made maps and photographs, and institutional data. Using this multitude of sources, Morrill and Musheno take readers into the everyday lives of NWHS students to demonstrate how the students use their physical locations, social networks, and adult alliances to navigate peer conflict. With 16 years of in-depth ethnographic data, the authors show how the everyday lives of NWHS students change in response to institutional policies, and specifically how these policies affect teens' approaches to peer trouble in school.
The longitudinal design allowed researchers to track peer responses to interpersonal and intergroup trouble before, during, and after the implementation of “safe schools” policies. Safe schools policies were implemented three years into the ethnography and relied on heavy surveillance, strict disciplinary actions, and the immobility of students. The meanings youth gave to trouble shifted between what Morrill and Musheno call “conciliatory remedial” and “moralistic” orientations. Conciliatory remedial orientations framed trouble as annoyances, mistakes, and misunderstandings, and invited the repair of social ties. On the other hand, moralistic orientations framed trouble as intentional transgressions with heightened negative emotionality. Before the implementation of safe schools policies, youth predominantly used conciliatory remedial approaches to both understand and resolve interpersonal and intergroup peer troubles. Students accessed these nonviolent strategies through “hangin' out” and “movin' around” campus during lunch and before and after school. Morrill and Musheno call this movement “anchored fluidity,” where students not only anchor themselves to peers based on social similarities like race, ethnicity, and class, but also travel across physical and sociocultural spaces on campus. Anchored fluidity allowed students to move on and off “front stages” where peer relations were public to “sanctuaries” in classrooms with trusted teachers, or private spaces on campus where youth could talk without audiences. Anchored fluidity allowed students opportunities to deal with conflict off front stages, and to traverse ethnic, racial, and class lines by splitting downtime between different friendship groups. For example, if I had trouble with another student, it allowed me to find an empty hall to privately resolve the tension where I otherwise might have confronted the student publicly in the cafeteria. Morrill and Musheno conclude that anchored fluidity is essential for students to access informal, nonviolent trouble handling on campus.
Students' responses to how they handled peer trouble dramatically shifted after a new administration adopted the safe schools' practices. Whereas students could previously enjoy the freedom to roam around campus and seek privacy in empty halls and classrooms, unsupervised time was no longer permitted. Instead, students were confined to large, public spaces like the cafeteria during down-time. As a result, students reported a heightened sense of territoriality and anxiety about finding private spaces to “work things out.” The administration created a physical space much like Jeremy Bentham's panopticon where students were monitored in all social settings, rendered immobile via confinement during nonacademic periods, and imprisoned within the large bars and fences surrounding the school. Consequently, students were forced to solve trouble in highly public settings.
Carceral control at NWHS exacerbated racial, ethnic, and class inequalities while demolishing social trust. First, racial minority students were disproportionately punished under the new disciplinary policies. Second, students could no longer mingle across racial and ethnic lines in low-stakes social environments. And third, the administration destroyed student–teacher alliances by promoting teachers' roles as disciplinarians rather than student allies. Conciliatory remedial methods of conflict resolution became difficult for young people to employ in social settings devoid of social trust and where students were unable to access space off front stages. In other words, students' conflict resolution became exclusively “front stage,” since all student downtime afforded no opportunities for the privacy or mobility characteristic of anchored fluidity. The conflict and anxiety caused by the safe schools' policies climaxed in the largest, most violent fight at NWHS.
As the commitment to safe schools diminished with changing administration, social trust in the student body slowly returned. Anchored fluidity replaced the former panopticon, restoring students' ability to solve trouble through conciliatory remedial methods. The revival of conciliatory remedial norms suggests both that anchored fluidity facilitates nonviolent conflict resolution among students and that a panopticon-like disciplinary structure destroys social trust and fosters violence. This book provides a glimpse into a school whose structures permit students in a high-poverty, ethnically and racially diverse school to create social trust and collective identity.
This book is part of a deeply important conversation about how laws and rules impact conflict resolution and how laws can both allow and prevent peaceful conflict resolution. In Morrill and Musheno's work, informal social spaces provided nonviolent resolution opportunities for students to deal with trouble. Conversely, formal disciplinary structures, without informal space for youth to handle conflict, fostered social anxiety and increased conflict among students. Morrill and Musheno's analysis of formal and informal laws within the school and their social consequences can be applied to legal scholarship more generally. The abolition of individual agency to informally handle peer trouble led to social distrust, and eventually, violence. Legal scholars should read this work as a demonstration of laws' ability to both create and destroy opportunities for informal, nonviolent, interpersonal conflict resolution. This book belongs in classrooms in legal studies, sociology, and education.
