Between Worlds: Identity, Culture, and Ambivalence in a Boarding School for “at-risk” Youth

This article examines how institutional efforts to support “at-risk” youth shape identity, belonging, and civic self-understanding over time. Drawing on year-long ethnographic fieldwork and a unique ten-year follow-up study, it analyzes life inside a community boarding school designed to intervene systematically in the everyday cultural practices of primarily Black and Latino children. The school seeks to promote mobility and stability by inducing a condition of social liminality—a sustained sense of being “in between” home and institution—through highly structured routines, disciplinary systems, and norms of self-presentation.Using an interpretive framework informed by work on total institutions, youth governance, and identity formation, the article shows how this strategy produces ambivalence rather than straightforward transformation. While students often adapt to institutional expectations and internalize messages about discipline, merit, and self-responsibility, they also develop secondary adaptations that reshape their relationships to family, community, and self. These adaptive responses persist into young adulthood, frequently generating a durable sense of disconnection from home communities even among those who “succeed” by institutional standards.The article contributes to scholarship on race and politics, youth socialization, and the governance of poverty by shifting attention from overt programmatic goals to the micro-level processes through which authority, culture, and care are negotiated. It argues that well-intentioned youth interventions can reproduce forms of exclusion by weakening social ties and reconfiguring identity under conditions of prolonged institutional control. The findings raise broader normative and policy questions about educational reform, juvenile justice alternatives, and the ethics of institutional strategies that seek to manage identity rather than support collective belonging.