ABSTRACT
Thomas’s school was populated solely by those labeled having emotional and/or behavioral disorder (EBD) and was, for most of the 19 young men in the room, the last step before juvenile detention. Yet the anxieties over those not-adults also work to obscure young people’s status as political subjects. Thomas and his cohort operated in a school environment that, while claiming to help young people labeled EBD learn life skills that would allow them to manage themselves in society, actually used power operations to let these specific young men know that they were, according to society, expendable, disposable, and deficient. However, to access young people in school situations, jokers often must align themselves with administrators to appear as insiders, as supportive of established rules, power relations, and narratives. The insider/outsider tension affects more than just the optics of the work; it can affect the work itself.
