Education in Youth Detention Homes An Ethnographic Study of Schooling Against the Odds

1. Introduction 2. Institutional frame 3. Accounting for setbacks and success 4. Pockets of personifications 5. School sabotage 6. Conclusion

Biography

David Wästerfors is a Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. His publications include Violence – Situation, Specialty, Politics and Storytelling (Routledge, 2022), Analyze! co-authored with Jens Rennstam, Accessibility Denied (Routledge, 2022), co-edited with Hanna Egard and Kristofer Hansson, and Hidden Attractions of Administration (Routledge 2023), with Malin Åkerström, Katarina Jacobsson and Erika Andersson Cederholm. His research often focuses on interactions, institutions, emotions, and social control at the intersections of social psychology, cultural sociology, and criminology. His additional and related interests include disability research as well as ethnography and qualitative methodology.

What an insightful book! Subtitled “schooling against the odds,” discovered is the surprising institutional context at the intersection of youth crime, treatment, and education. The diverse interests, competing accounts, and forms of sabotage transpire performatively within an orderly social world.  Meaning-making, strategic actions, and everyday identities repeatedly construct and resolve for all practical purposes what might at a glance appear chaotic and contradictory. The documentation is superb and the message highly significant.     

Jaber F. Gubrium, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Missouri, USA

This highly readable ethnography is methodologically innovative, theoretically informed, and rich with policy implications. The book’s crowning achievement may be the empirical and site-specific exploration of motivation, not as a fixed personal attribute but a collaborative effort. David Wästerfors artfully demonstrates how motivation is realized through ongoing and personalized interactions between the staff and youth against the backdrop of cold institutional conditions. While informed by Goffman’s total institutions, Wästerfors shows that institutions need to be malleable to effect reform. In sum, the book is a brilliant contribution to the multidisciplinary study of life in institutional settings.

Amir Marvasti, Professor of Sociology, Penn State Altoona