Navigating Conflict ― How Youth Handle Trouble in a High-poverty School

Urban schools are often associated with violence, chaos, and youth aggression. But is this reputation really the whole picture? In Navigating Conflict, Calvin Morrill and Michael Musheno challenge the violence-centered conventional wisdom of urban youth studies, revealing instead the social ingenuity with which teens informally and peacefully navigate strife-ridden peer trouble. Taking as their focus a multi-ethnic, high-poverty school in the American southwest, the authors complicate our vision of urban youth, along the way revealing the resilience of students in the face of carceral disciplinary tactics.

Grounded in sixteen years of ethnographic fieldwork, Navigating Conflict draws on archival and institutional evidence to locate urban schools in more than a century of local, state, and national change. Morrill and Musheno make the case for schools that work, where negative externalities are buffered and policies are adapted to ever-evolving student populations. They argue that these kinds of schools require meaningful, inclusive student organizations for sustaining social trust and collective peer dignity alongside responsive administrative leadership. Further, students must be given the freedom to associate and move among their peers, all while in the vicinity of watchful, but not intrusive adults. Morrill and Musheno make a compelling case for these foundational conditions, arguing that only through them can schools enable a rich climate for learning, achievement, and social advancement.

Calvin Morrill is the Stefan A. Riesenfeld Professor of Law, professor of sociology, and associate dean for jurisprudence and social policy in the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Executive Way: Conflict Management in Corporations, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Michael Musheno is professor of law and faculty director of legal studies at the University of Oregon School of Law. He is coauthor of Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Frontlines of Public Service and Deployed: How Reservists Bear the Burdens of Iraq.