Research Seed Grant | 2008-2009

With the potential election of Barack Obama as our country’s first African American president looming in the background, today’s urban youth are grappling with a faltering economy, unsafe neighborhoods and schools, and a carceral complex that has ensnared many of their family members, peers, and neighbors. At the same time, there has been an intensifying symbiosis between the educational and criminal justice systems. This interrelationship is dramatically exemplified by the recent announcement that the Chicago Police Department will have access to real-time security camera footage from inside and outside schools. The “routine” monitoring of the schoolhouse by those who provide the jailhouse with their inhabitants is of great consequence. Therefore, youth perspectives on social injustice and experiences with criminal injustice, as mediated by their home and school contexts, should be of central importance to sociologists and policy-makers alike.

 

This proposed research seeks to capitalize on this great moment in our social and political history by surveying 500 Chicago public school students’ perceptions of social and criminal injustice after the 2008 presidential election. Prior examinations of this population occurred in the spring of 2001 after the Bush/Gore election controversy, and in the spring of 2005 after Bush’s reelection and Obama’s election to the Senate. This seeded proposal will be the first phase of a mixed method project that seeks to “map the terrain” of perceived injustice across school and residential contexts as informed by each youth’s race/ethnicity, gender, class, and other important background variables. The variable at the center of the study, perceived injustice, measures the attitudes ninth and tenth grade public school students hold about social and structural disadvantage in general. This may include their awareness of differential opportunities for economic or educational success; and personal and/or vicarious interactions with authoritative institutions and their representatives, such as teachers in schools or police officers on the street.