(Be)longing and resisting: a narrative excavation of critical ontogeny

The present study is a narrative representation of two individuals - one, a prison abolitionist living in the Phoenix area and, the other, myself as a writer and scholar - and their development of, negotiations with, desires for, and problematic performances of critical dispositions within the contemporary social order. In initiating this research, I framed my process as an exploration of the ways in which people who commit themselves to organized counter-hegemonic movements have developed critical dispositions despite their immersion in the normative discourse of American public schools and the relentless public pedagogies of neoliberal subjectivity and psyche. In essence, I wondered how people had gained both the capacity to perceive - however fleetingly - an outside to doxic structuration and, more difficult yet, to sacrifice the psychic comfort these structures promise for the risky work of creating a more just social order. Via psychoanalytic understandings of identity and desire, these stories explore and represent the primordial learning, experiences, and traumas that guided my informants to resist or reject dominant ontological narratives and normative cultural scripts in order to explore and maintain space - albeit exilic - for their own axiological and ethical development and, ultimately, to take up positions of active, educative resistance.