On Blackness and Boyhood: Exploring the Educational and Emotional Lives of Somali Male Youth

While there is a shortage of literature addressing the educational experiences of Somali-speaking students at present, the research that does exist reveals that students of Somali descent show low educational attainment and some of the highest drop-out rates of any minority group within the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). My research aims to explore this exact phenomenon by looking to the educational and emotional experiences of boy students who are of Somali descent, and who have at some point during their education been suspended, expelled, and/or labeled as at-risk for academic, emotional, and/or behavioral issues. My goal is to examine how male Somali students represent, understand, and navigate their understandings of education in the context of their experiences of expulsion, segregation, and/or exclusion at school. My study uses in-depth, semi-structured interviews that will draw on both visual and narrative methodologies. Drawing from critical childhood studies, I propose to incorporate visual representation (i.e., drawing) as a way to accompany and deepen my understanding of participants’ experiences that are sometimes not easily captured in language alone (Luttrell, 2020). All told, my aims are to gain insight into the ways that Black boys understand and conceptualize a school structure that has historically marginalized them and continues to, and the ways that they remain actively and imaginatively engaged in their own world-making. Overall, this study aims to contribute to existing literature on institutionalized racism within the education system, and it particularly aims to pose relevant implications for topics emerging from the field of postcolonial psychoanalysis. This study is also the first of its kind in that it foregrounds the emotional lives of Somali youth as they lived within social structures of racism.