Introduction

This chapter has two main purposes. First, this chapter introduces what the author calls “educational necropolitics” as a theoretical framework to consider the many ways that schools and systems of schooling harm minoritized students in the interest of sociopolitical and cultural control. Alongside this theorization, this chapter lays the groundwork for some of the central findings of this study. Specifically, that schools enact, maintain, and normalize various kinds of educational choking and lynching across the forms of curriculum (formal, enacted, hidden, and null). The secondary purpose of this chapter is to explicate the method of this book, sonic ethnography, as it exists at the intersections of anthropology, sound studies, and, central to this book, educational research. The point here is not to claim the method as “new,” but, rather, to think about the significance of this method as a tool to engage in deep listening practices with minoritized youth.