Katie Hejtmanek: My doctoral research examines the American social inequalities that lead to the incarceration of inner-city youth into residential treatment centers, how the youth are rehabilitated once institutionalized, and how the youth come to understand and discuss the experiences of this process. I analyze three levels of adolescent institutionalization – structural inequalities, one institution’s culture and official treatment models, and the lived experiences of the residents. I find the adolescents lived experiences of their treatment to be the most interesting. |
 My dissertation illuminates how the institutionalized adolescents, most of whom are black youth from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, experienced their treatment in racial terms. They complicated their stories of abuse, neglect, mental illness, recovery, state guardianship, and juvenile delinquency with understandings primarily of racial identity and selfhood. In my dissertation I argue these were not standard racial discourses. Instead the residents found ways of being and seeing in others multiple races. They integrated their mental illness rehabilitation, their longing to return to a “normal life”, their understandings of and feelings about the institution’s culture, and their self-transformation in terms first of race and then of gender. In my dissertation I provide examples of how residents verbally index categories of black, white, mixed, manhood, and femininity when discussing internal emotional states. They would then link these internal feelings with outward moral and cultural codes and behaviors. Most interesting was the transformation of indexing, internal feelings, outward behaviors, and moral codes over the course of their tenure in an institution designed to explicitly resocialize them. I argue this transformation was through emotionality evidencing how humans can come to sincerely believe in competing cultural logics. |
| My dissertation is based on eighteen months of classic ethnographic field research. I lived in a small room on one residential treatment center I call Havenwood. During my field research I conducted life history interviews with twenty residents; collected thousands of pages of documents including mental health and social history files and official treatment philosophy texts; observed hundreds of hours of meetings to discuss such things as facility level accreditation, staff challenges, and resident admittance, progress, and discharge; participated in months of staff orientation and training; and participated in thousands of hours of residential life. My dissertation research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Cultural Anthropology. |