Permission (Not) Granted Regulation of Public Children’s Spaces Through Spaces as Coding Machines

Abstract

The space of an elementary school is expected to regulate the bodies of the children within its fences. While the space of the school does this as expected, it also exerts regulation on adults inside and outside of the school space. I engage in formal participant observation of a public street and public school over three days, alongside an immersive ethnography. Formal observation allows participants to remain affectively unaffected, while community membership lends the project benefits of immersive ethnography, like context. I rely on Deleuzian concepts of coding machines, facialization, and affect to address how space codes and recodes bodies through their interactions with boundaries and Manning’s notion of “leaking” affect. I pose the school space as leaky and argue that the space touches bodies both inside and outside of its boundaries and is affectively touched by those bodies in return. This project identifies four particular kinds of bodies affecting each other: the school itself, the children-students, the adults, and the unaffiliated bodies outside the school. I argue that bodies interacting with the school are constantly negotiating permissions: some, like children and teachers, may enter; some may leave. These negotiations extend even to gaze; some may look into the yard, while others (particularly adult men) must actively look down or away. This article considers the conceptions of acceptable bodies in particular places and the processes, formal and informal, which allow some bodies into space and deny others, framed through an understanding of overcoding, legibility, and affect.