Black Girl Cartography: Black Girlhood and Place-Making in Education Research

Abstract

Drawing on research in education, Black Girlhood studies, and conversations connected to girlhood and cartography, this chapter calls for transdisciplinary analyses of Black girls’ sociocultural and geopolitical locations in education research. In reviewing education research documenting the practices and interrogating the experiences of Black girls, I propose the framework of Black Girl Cartography. In addition to an analysis of education research, I offer a series of theoretical and methodological openings for transformative and liberatory work grounded in Black Girl knowledge and practices.

Black Girl Cartographies

“Intersectional Black feminism,” or intersectionality rooted in Black feminist practices and theories (Blige, 2010, 2013; Carastathis, 2014; Collins, 2000), names the multiple axes of difference and makes clear how equitable and ethical interventions should be conceived. In other words, since Black women experience oppressions along the lines of space, place, race, gender, sexuality, and class, liberation should be imagined along those same lines. For example, in 1990, eight teenagers raped and murdered Harbour, a 26-year-old Black woman who was also a mother in Dorchester, Massachusetts (Crenshaw, 1991). Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) discusses the ways that Harbour’s story did not draw as much media attention as White women who were assaulted or reported missing that year. Yet there was little discussion about the interplay of patriarchy, misogyny, and the structural inequities that shaped Dorchester into a dangerous location for young women of color. How might the impending gentrification of the historically poor neighborhood transform it into a place of violence against Black female bodies, and the erasure of said violence? Similar questions can be asked of Baltimore, Maryland (Alphonza Watson), New Orleans, Louisiana (Chyna Gibson and Ciara McElveen), Cleveland, Ohio (Tonia Carmichael, Crystal Dozier, Tishanna Culver, Le’Shanda Long, Michelle Mason, Kim Yvette Smith, Nancy Cobbs, Amelda Hunter, Telacia Forston, Janice Webb, and Diane Turner), St. Petersburg, Florida (Dominique Battle, Ashaunti Butler, and Laniya Miller), Seattle, Washington (Charleena Lyles and her unborn child), and Detroit, Michigan (Aiyana Jones and Shelly Hilliard). The same holds true for Black girls, whose oppressions, in addition to those listed, are also linked to the liminality of age (Winn, 2010).

In Kinloch’s work with youth in Harlem, three Black female participants bring attention to what it means to be a Black female attending school in and living in an urban community. Kinloch’s (2010) former research assistant, Rebekkah Hogan (research participant) asserts, “I occupy an interesting location in the matrix of gentrification” (p. 116). Although she is older than the high school student participants, she still lives in Harlem, and her assertion speaks to the ways Black girlhood is tied to geospatial location. She continues by reflecting on how Harlem is a place of belonging for her, as she is able to move through spaces (e.g., a Dominican bakery, a Senegalese grocery store) without question due to the color of her skin. However, her class status simultaneously dislocates her from working-class community members, as she is “educated” with a “middle-class job” that allows her to afford the increasing rent in the disappearing neighborhoods (Kinloch, 2010, p. 116). Another poignant moment for Black girls in the text emerges during an interview at Harlem High School (pseudonym). During the interview, Samantha (17-year-old Black female student) asserts that “they’d rather for us to struggle” (Kinloch, 2010, p. 52) in reference to developers and government officials who are not making life easier for current Harlem residents, especially those who are working-class or living fixed-income households. Through the space of the interview, the girls “were sharing stories about gentrification, place, and race that they did not share during the course of their schooling, but that had an impact on their out-of-school lived experiences” (p. 52). Through Samantha’s assertion and Kinloch’s observation, we come to see that Black girls—and the researchers who work with them—are attentive to the ways race, class, gender, and additional interlocking identities tied to place funnel into urban classrooms.

As a result, I am working toward a praxis-oriented framework that I am calling “Black Girl Cartography,” or the study of how and where Black girls are physically and sociopolitically mapped in education. For this chapter, I focus on the types of knowledge Black women education researchers connect to Black girls’ geopolitical and social locations (e.g., race, gender, age, sexuality, ability, and class). Specifically, I consider how Black Girl cartographers—scholars and researchers responsible for most of the education research featured here—push intersectionality in education to be more critical of the connections between oppressions and geopolitical and sociocultural locations, by opening with a discussion of location as addressed in intersectional Black feminism. The second section, “Black Girl Cartography: Mapping our Stories,” offers an overview of what is required of scholars who use (and seek to use) the framework to consider how Black Girlhood is informed, reformed, or stifled by the geopolitical space of school. The piece continues with a discussion of how I came to this framework and set of publications about Black girls. Through a selective review of education research during a decade of Black Girlhood Celebration (Kwakye, Hill, & Callier, 2017), I focus on two emergent themes: “Black Girl navigational practices” and “Black Girl charting.” The chapter closes with a series of theoretical and methodological possibilities, returning to the notion of Black girls’ (and women’s) knowledge as pathways to social transformation and liberation.

Intersectional Black Feminisms¹: Charting Resistance

From Anna Julia Cooper’s “train station” (1891–1892) to the Combahee River Collective’s idea of “interlocking” (1977/1995) to Deborah King’s revision of “jeopardy” (Beale 1969) with her conception of “multiple jeopardy” (1988) to Hortense Spillers’ “interstices” (1984) to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersection” (1989) and beyond, there have been attempts to create metaphors capable of capturing experiences of oppression that seem to twist and turn so as to resist being tracked. (Dotson, 2013, p. 3)

Black girls and women’s liberatory practices have been, and will continue to be, rooted in the spaces that we demand, seek, create, and cultivate. In 1977, a collective of Black feminists, lesbians, and Black feminist lesbians issued “A Black Feminist Statement” calling attention to the interlocking oppressions stemming from racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, and classism that Black women experience. The Combahee River Collective’s Statement highlighted the sociopolitical intersections of these oppressions and articulated the ways Black feminism should be considered “the logical political movement” to liberate “all women of color.” For the Collective, the Black feminist practices toward liberation are rooted in the epistemologies of Sojourner Truth, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and Harriet Tubman. The group’s name, Combahee River Collective, intentionally alludes to a site of Tubman’s liberatory practices. Tubman’s guidance of 150 Black Union soldiers along South Carolina’s Combahee River resulted in the freedom of approximately 750 enslaved peoples (Guy-Sheftall, 1995). The campaign’s success relied heavily on Tubman’s sociopolitical locations as a Black enslaved woman, which deeply informed her knowledge of the land and the people. To me, a major component of “intersectional Black feminism” (B. Cooper, 2015, p. 15) that emerges from the rhetorical work of the Statement is sociopolitical locations—race, class, gender, and geopolitical location—of resistance.

The Combahee River Collective’s work to connect to a genealogy of Black women’s resistance is echoed in the work of contemporary scholars thinking about Black women’s knowledge and location. In Demonic Grounds, McKittrick (2006) focuses on how Black women navigated the Americas, a place she describes as “a geographic landscape that is upheld by a legacy of exploitation, exploration, and conquest” (p. xiv). I argue that the Americas are a geopolitical landscape, created by legal documents rooted in patriarchy, capitalism, and Eurocentric concepts of empire.² Therefore, we come to see how Black women engage in fugitivity—acts of resistance, escape, and survival—throughout the transatlantic slave trade in other geopolitical spaces: the hulls of slave ships, the tops of auction blocks, and hidden spaces of homes. Black women recognized that their bodies were vulnerable to violence and exploitation, and in that held deep visions of liberation and survival. As McKittrick (2006) asserts, “Black matters are spatial matters” (p. xiv). In other words, conceptions of Blackness are tied to reclaiming a sense of belonging, weaving one’s self into genealogies of resilience, and conjuring new imaginings of existing. The Combahee River Collective’s name and Statement signal to the ways in which Black women have been fighting for, making and demanding epistemological and physical spaces.

For this chapter, I am defining space as formally uncharted locations that are still inhabited, used, and created. Physical space can occur within a recognized place (e.g., building, ship, home, city, state, body of water), while epistemological space refers to locations in a field of study or discipline. In analyzing these spaces, we begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of how “Black women and girls, trans* people and queer people become victims of anti-Black state violence” (Lindsey, 2015, p. 233) and epistemic violence (Dotson, 2011; Spivak, 1988). Black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson (2013) demands that analyses of Black women’s oppressions require naming spaces where Black women are excluded or included and by whom. For her, an analysis of Black women’s oppressions requires “politics of social spatiality” (Dotson, 2013, p. 17). In her reading of Anna Julia Cooper, “Black women simply did not have a ‘field’ of space,” Dotson (2013) asserts “that lent to interpreting Black women’s place in American social landscapes” (p. 19). A. J. Cooper’s (1891) encounter with two rooms—one for “ladies” and one for “colored people”—reinforces Fannie Barrier Williams’s (1905) description of Black women existing “beneath, beyond, and outside of US social imaginaries.” Therefore, the rhetorical work of Black feminists who penned the Combahee River Collective Statement were grounded in a politics of spatiality, one that reasserted Black women’s presence in American physical and social landscapes.

Black feminist legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) builds on Black feminism’s interest in mapping and analyzing Black women sociopolitical locations. Denouncing “single-axis framework” for the analysis of Black women’s experiences, she calls attention to “intersections.” In 1991, she critiqued how media, women’s shelters, and the judicial system (e.g., police officers, jurors, judges) neglected, underserved, and dismissed sexual violence perpetrated against women of color victims/survivors. Her three-part discussion illuminates how the intersecting axes of race, gender, and class often displace women of color victims, as they are unable to find solace, shelter, and assistance. I am particularly drawn to what intersectionality reveals about location. Through Dotson (2011, 2013) and Crenshaw’s lenses, we see that intersectionality is not just about interlocking identities, but it is also about how those identities interlock with geopolitical locations. Geopolitical locations undergird the notion that places are created through laws, ordinances, and zoning codes. Rezoning laws, unemployment, as well as racial and class discrimination in the housing industry gentrified places like Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the 1990s. Once we factor in misogyny, patriarchy, and dehumanizing ideas around Black women’s bodies into this economically disenfranchised neighborhood, young Black poor or working-class women living in such a neighborhood, like Kimberly Rae Harbour, become vulnerable to violence. Therefore, intersectional Black feminists are concerned with understanding how geopolitical locations compound the social inequities that Black women experience.

Black Girl Cartography: Mapping Our Stories

To engage in the work of Black Girl Cartography, we are required to be in explicit conversations about place, race, and gender. Such conversations can begin with research methods that explore mapping as a method to reveal inequities and interlocking oppressions (Annamma, 2017). Mapping as a method generates questions such as: What is the narrative behind why the researcher selected this town, city, or neighborhood? What are the girls saying about the town or city? Where is the research “site” in relation to the spaces/places where the girls avoid or spend time? How are girls making use of a place? In answering these questions, we can begin to see how Black girl research relies on the social geography—frequency of movement, entering and exiting, spaces of inclusion and exclusion—of Black girls. This also begins to reveal how a place may or may not welcome Black girls, and how that informs the girls’ practices. For example, if girls do not frequent the local library, but are more likely to be found at a community center, how will the researcher account for the girls’ place-making practices in the research? By exploring such narratives, we are moving away from sterile and exploitative research practices and instead begin to call into question our research motives and how they may or may not align with the girls’ practices, ways of knowing, and being.

Mapping is also applicable to theoretical mapping of Black girls. Gholson’s (2016) study of how Black girls are relegated to the research gaps in mathematics education echoes a larger issue of regarding where and how Black girls are situated in social imaginations.³ In her critical analysis of policy reports published by the College Board Advocacy and Policy Center, she notes how the data reporting process erases Black girls. While one report disaggregates by race and ethnicity, the other only disaggregates by gender. As a result, Black girls are hidden in statistics for “Black” students or “female” students, but neither report makes room for both a holistic analysis of how Black girls are performing in mathematics. Therefore, she is putting forth a call for radical creative research that cultivates knowledge about Black girls. Without such research, Black girls are pushed to the “proverbial shadows of inquiry in mathematics education” (Gholson, 2016, p. 298) and studied in passing. For example, Black girls may become visible when research focuses on “endangered” Black male students or to discuss the Black-White achievement gap. Black girls are rendered “ungeographic” in the field and, as she notes, are left to “engage in the domestic housekeeping of theoretical spaces so that others’ identities can be salient and knowable within mathematics education” (Gholson, 2016, p. 298). Therefore, her work brings attention to the ways that race, class, gender, location, and knowledge production are intricately linked. When mathematics education research cannot recognize “Black girl” as an identity, interventions for and pedagogy stemming from such an identity are unimaginable. As a result, Black girls are scripted as incapable of learning mathematics and incapable of providing substantial contributions to the field.

In addition to exploring one’s stories of entry and “rationale,” Black Girl Cartography requires self-reflection. When Black Girl cartographers dig into the stories behind our research questions, sites, and implications, we find that we are face-to-face with our younger selves. I am defining Black Girl cartographers as researchers, scholars, advocates, and individuals who self-identify as a “Black Girl” and who have a deep concern for Black girls’ health, lives, well-being and ways of being. Our commitments to Black girls extend beyond the page and the walls of the academy; instead, we express an interest in sustaining, imagining, and mapping (or protecting) sites of “learning, self-love, and critical discourse where women and girls can come together to share” (Phelps-Ward & Laura, 2016, p. 818). Black Girl cartographers’ writings emerge as testaments, letters, and entries to younger selves and future selves, to women and girls that we have grown with and some whom we may never meet. To one another, we offer new ways of using Black feminism and womanism to explore our own stories (Baker-Bell, 2017; Cutts, 2012; Lindsay-Dennis, 2015; K. T. Edwards, Baszile, & Guillory, 2016). Through this work, we begin to see how our own educational experiences have guided us back into classroom spaces so that we may be more intentional about our practices. As a result, we find ourselves centering the stories of Black women (Butler, 2017), being attentive to the lived experiences of Black girls (Love, 2017), and thinking about what it means to become a Black woman learner and teacher (Bailey & Miller, 2015; E. Edwards, McArthur & Russell-Owens, 2016; Ford, 2016). We also teach others to do the same. Therefore, Black Girl Cartography requires a commitment of engaging in an ongoing dialogue with past, present, and future Black girls and women, especially one’s self.

Methods for Locating Black Girl Cartographers in Education Research

The Combahee River Collective reminds us that to be an intersectional Black feminist is to be engaged in an ongoing practice of reflexivity—where we call into question our everyday politics, beliefs, and behaviors. As a Black Girl cartographer, my work of charting the creative practices of Black girls is grounded in the notion that I am not first and I am not alone. I am consistently thinking about my connection to other scholars who are doing the work with and on behalf of Black girls in the present and in the future. Becoming a Black Girl cartographer requires drawing on lessons that we learned from our experiences as Black girls and/or working with Black girls (Dillard, 2000; Lindsay-Dennis, 2015). Unfortunately, for some education researchers, “there is so much about Black identity”—and Blackgirl identity⁴—“that doesn’t get called into practice” (Smith & Smith, 1981, p. 119). Therefore, I intentionally called my Blackgirlness into practice to craft this chapter. When I present, I often begin with the assertion that I am a Geechee Girl whose research is focused on documenting the stories of Black women who are willing to share them with me so that I may share with others. I use the term Geechee Girl to evoke identities and knowledges informed by race, gender, and place; therefore, I am a Black girl from the Southeastern United States, specifically from South Carolina Sea Island community of Johns Island. The lenses through which I see the world rely heavily upon relationships grounded in trust, reciprocity, responsibility, and respect (Torrez, 2018) for self and others. This is key because these lenses inform the research methods, citational practice, and structure associated with this and other projects.

Through the radical citation practice (Tuck, 2017) of citing Black women scholars who work with/for Black girls, this chapter attempts to make visible how educators and education researchers are engaging in this intergenerational moment around Black Girlhood. Although advocates, scholars, relatives, and more have been doing the work of honoring, documenting, and nurturing Black Girlhood, 2006 ushered in an era: Black Girlhood Celebration (Kwakye et al., 2017) on a larger platform. To highlight the contributions and achievements of Black women and girls, Beverly Bond launched “Black Girls Rock!” as an organization and Black Entertainment Television awards show. In 2009, Toni Carey and Ashley-Hicks-Rocha began the campaign #BlackGirlsRun to challenge health disparities among Black women and girls. In 2013, CaShawn Thompson started a movement with “Black Girls Are Magic” (#BlackGirlMagic) and Renina Jarmon revealed that it is because “Black Girls are From the Future.” In their 2014 report on policing and schooling, the African American Policy Forum declared that Black Girls Matter. These dates, declarations, and movements are important because they are milestones along Black Girlhood’s journey into the mainstream. They are also encapsulated in the year parameters I used for my search: research published between 2007 and 2017. To construct this chapter, I relied on #BlackGirl networks on social media (Facebook and Twitter) to crowdsource citations and publications from scholars who focus on Black girls in education. In addition to receiving five publications through the social media announcement, I connected with scholars whose research focuses on Black girls in other areas of study (e.g., public health, disability studies, sociology, law, and art education).⁵ I also searched electronic databases such as ProQuest, JSTOR, and Google Scholar for empirical studies and theoretical discussions about Black girls. ProQuest and EBSCO Host searches of “Black girls,” “Black female adolescents,” and “education” generated education research that focuses on Black girls in urban schools, communities, and afterschool programs. The search yielded 24 publications, including 3 books and 21 peer-reviewed articles, which I analyzed using the following questions:

Are the authors using Black feminist or womanist frameworks? (If yes, proceed to Question 2. If no, do not use here. Save for later.)

How are the authors conceptualizing the practices and knowledges of Black girls?

Did the authors create the site (i.e., program or class) or was the site in place (i.e., a school)?

Do the authors discuss the research site? If so, how?

Two major themes that emerged from the research are “Black Girl navigational practices” and “Black Girl charting” (see Table 1). In these studies, the scholars—Black Girl cartographers—often documented how schools functioned as geopolitical sites or spaces where adults and peers attempted to (and sometimes successfully) stop Black girl collective practices, punish Black girl movements, and fragment Black girl identities. Therefore, Black Girl navigational practices are connected to the ways that girls work together in the face of individual meritocracy, choose movement over stagnation, and choose to bring their whole selves when schools demand fragmentation. “Black Girl charting” focuses on the tools—curricula and digital space—students and facilitators use to carve out spaces for Black girls to thrive.

Table 1

Themes and Focal Studies on Black Girls in Education

Overarching Theme	Emergent Themes	Studies
Black Girl cartographer research methodologies: Black feminist and womanist methods	Reflexive storytelling	Baker-Bell (2017)
		Bailey and Miller (2015)
		Butler (2017)
		Cutts (2012)
		E. Edwards, McArthur, et al. (2016)
		Ford (2016)
		Lindsay-Dennis (2015)
		Love (2017)
Black Girl Cartography: Schools are hostile geopolitical spaces for Black girls	Black Girl navigational practices	Hines-Datiri and CarterAndrews (2017)
		Brown (2013)
		Hill (2011, 2016)
		Johnson (2017)
		Kinloch (2010, 2012)
		Lane (2017)
		Watson (2016)
	Black Girl charting: Curricula and digital spaces	Greene (2016)
		Muhammad and Haddix (2016)
		Nyachae (2016)
		Ohito (2016)
		Phelps-Ward and Laura (2016)
		Price-Dennis (2016)

Black Girls Navigating Practices

Figured Worlds: Schools as Geopolitical Spaces

Black Girl cartographers interrogate how Black girls unpack their relationships between race, gender, class, and geospatial location. Such work speaks to Dotson’s (2013) notion of Black feminists’ move toward a “politics of spatiality” (p. 17), or calling attention to the theoretical and physical spaces that Black women create, require, and sustain. Emerging from the theoretical work and lived experiences of self-identified Black girls and women, inquiries in the field of Black Girlhood studies (Brown, 2013; Hill, 2011, 2016; Lindsey, 2013) are attentive to the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, especially in schools.

While Black Girlhood studies point specifically to Black girl spaces, girlhood cartography studies interrogate the intersections of race, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and location. Scholars mapping and charting Black girl practices reveal how said girls are epistemically and physically excluded from notions of girlhood. In their work on dis/abled girls and Girl Power, Erevelles and Mutua (2005) assert that elements of Girl Power that are grounded in ableism and heteronormativity, “independence, assertiveness, and strength laced with patriarchal notions of beauty and attractiveness” (p. 127) move dis/abled girls to the periphery of girlhood (Schalk, 2013). Research emerging from dis/ability critical race theory, or DisCrit (Annamma, 2017; Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013) and Black disability studies (Schalk, 2017) explores the intersections of race and dis/ability, but not the intersections race, dis/ability, gender, and sexuality. For education, the conversations about race and dis/ability move toward interventions for students of color and special education (Blanchett, 2014; Tefera, Thorius, & Artiles, 2014) and move the field closer to seeing Black dis/abled girls. By placing cartographies of girlhood in conversation with Black Girlhood studies, we can craft a framework to understand how schools function as geopolitical spaces and how Black girls navigate said spaces. In doing so, we develop a heightened sense of urgency about what Black girls’ presence (or absence) in research means for the state of the field, and more important, for the lives of Black girls.

For Black Girl cartographers, disciplinary actions construct schools as hostile geopolitical spaces that often threaten Black girls’ learning and their livelihood. Hines-Datiri and Carter Andrews (2017) examine how Black girls are policed in learning spaces. They position schools where zero tolerance policies are implemented as figured worlds built on notions of whiteness and femininity.⁶ Such positioning echoes the work of Black Girl cartographers (Bailey & Miller, 2015; Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Halliday, 2017; Hill, 2016; Johnson, 2017; Lane, 2017) who examine schools as heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, sexist, and ableist geopolitical practices that limit Blackgirl ways of being. As a result, these spaces force Black girls “to accept, reject, or negotiate identities of criminalization and misplaced femininity” (Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2017, p. 14) to not be pushed out of classrooms. However, Black girls creatively navigate these misplaced identities and work together to reclaim classrooms as sites of belonging.

Navigational Practices

Black Girl cartographers also highlight how Black girls carve out spaces in urban schools to engage in sustainable practices of teaching and caring for one another. In Crossing Boundaries (Kinloch, 2012), Damya and Christina reimagined the classroom as a site for edification and guidance. Throughout the course of the year, graduating seniors Damya (17-year-old African American female student) and Christina (19-year-old Afro-Jamaican female student) had an “antagonistic relationship” where the two often engaged in heated verbal exchanges (p.99). However, during a peer writing exchange, Christina asked Damya to partner with her, read her paper, and provide feedback. Kinloch notes that because “Christina respected Damya,” she chose Damya in hopes that she would engage in “a very special kind of listening” with her that requires “open hearts and minds” (Delpit, 1995, p. 46, quoted by Kinloch, 2012, p. 99). Through their peer review, Damya expressed a deep concern for Christina, who although she was a high school senior, had “not mastered academic codes and conventions in ways that would allow her to assert a stronger academic voice” (p. 98). Kinloch highlights how Christina and Damya reclaimed the contentious classroom space as one to build constructive relationships. By working through each other’s stories and leaning on each other’s strengths, we come to see how Black girls “author themselves in new agentive ways” (Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2017, p. 14). As a result, Black girls’ efforts to work together pushes back against educational spaces that are rooted in individualism and meritocracy.

Black Girl cartographers map classrooms as sites where girls still grapple with connections between identities and place. Watson (2016) speaks with six girls attending City High School (pseudonym), located in a “large urban city in the northeastern United States” (p. 242). While the girls expressed that they felt safe at City High School, the girls also expressed concerns about the school’s inability to counter pervasive narratives of Black girls. For example, Christine shares insight about stigmas that limit Black girls’ movement through the school, stigmas “that Black girls are supposed to be loud and ratchet and ghetto” (p. 245). While some girls negotiate or reject “loud and ratchet and ghetto,” Christine’s observation raises questions about how community members and educators have mapped certain ways of being onto place. How are notions of urban, ghetto and defiant unpacked productively among scholars, girls, teachers, and researchers? In the case of Kim and Samantha, Kinloch (2010) pushes back on concepts that link urban spaces to negative behaviors. For her, Black girls emerge as “street survivors,” whom she describes as individuals with “a sophisticated awareness about the community, its history, and street codes (e.g., language; dispositions; appearance; popular venues/spots like the Apollo)” (Kinloch, 2010, p. 49). Therefore, urban spaces for Black girls are sites of complex relationships and sophisticated practices rather than sites of one-dimensional ways of being and knowing.

Through their work, Black girl practices emerge as temporal and spatial acts of intentional resistances, innovative productions, and creative engagements. The same can be said for Black trans*girls, Black queer girls, Black gender nonconfirming girls, and more iterations of being Black girl that theoretically and physically disrupt space, or “bring wreck” (Pough, 2004). Their presence and practices force the field to interrogate how spaces, such as schools and communities, are constructed and maintained by heteronormative, racist, sexist, and ableist ideologies. Two examples of bringing “wreck” that transforms school spaces can be found in the embodied practices of writing (Johnson, 2017) and moving (Hill, 2011, 2016). In her work with queer youth of color, Johnson (2017) highlights the writing of Anika, a 17-year-old Black queer female who uses the pen for truth telling and to raise questions about visibility and “heteronormative hegemony” (p. 27). “Why can’t you see me?” she writes, “Is it because I love your sister?/Because I dress like your brother?” (p. 27). To disrupt notions of how gender is curated, constructed, and (mis)read, Anika challenges those reading both her writing and her body. As a result, she urges readers to consider how she wants to be read as she navigates spaces. Hill (2016) explores a research participant’s (Unique, “16-year-old raised in a Cameroonian American household”) assertion that, “Not all of us are idiots and start twerkin’ in the middle of the hallway for no good reason! I actually read books” (p. 6, emphasis in original). “The act of twerkin’ in the middle of the [school] hallway,” Hill offers (2017), could be read as “an act of resistance where foregrounding the Blackgirl body transforms the school hallway into a place of comfort and/or where Blackgirls claim authority” (p. 6). Though she does not use the word “map” or “cartography” in her work, Hill’s (2017) discussion of Blackgirl body movements map schools, more specifically the liminal spaces of hallways, as spaces where Black girls begin to challenge oppressive structures that seek to police their bodies. Such work not only points to the resistant and generative cartographies of Black girls, it also points to what we should be considering in research that centers the lived experiences of Black girls—their whole selves moving through and transforming spaces.

Black Girl Charting: Curricula and Digital Spaces

Black Girl cartographers explore the interstitial space of curricula in search of how Black girls are represented in, working with, or critiquing texts. In their review of Black Girl literacies, Muhammad and Haddix (2016) include a section on research connected to Black girls, children’s and young adult literature and urban fiction. They conclude that children’s and young literature focused on Black girl bodies, specifically “body image, skin color” and “representations of Black girls’ hair” (p. 318), while urban fiction usually focused on young Black female (16–23 years of age) protagonists who face and overcome difficulties. In their study of Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer, Howard and Ryan (2017) focus on how Black Girl Power manifests in the 12-year-old character Delphine Gaither. “Black girls on the cusp of adolescence can draw on their lived experiences” of Black tween characters like Delphine “and become agents of change” (Howard & Ryan, 2017, p. 178). While it is important to think about the themes that are explored in literature, especially when they positively impact girls’ perceptions of self, it is equally important to consider how children’s, young adult, and urban literature map Black girl geographies as well. For example, of the five young adult books that are mentioned in the review, two books are set in inner-city/urban communities (Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes and The Skin I’m In by Sharon Flake), one book is set in an all-white school in Connecticut (Jacqueline Woodson’s Maizon at Blue Hill), one book is set in Georgia/change of setting to Georgia (Rita Williams-Garcia’s Like Sisters on the Homefront), and one book is set in a high school, though the geopolitical location is unclear (Sharon Draper’s November Blues). Collectively, these texts signal as to where Black girls are most prevalent or at least can thrive in the literary imaginations of writers and readers. Similarly, urban fiction, “street literature, hip-hop literature, Black pulp fiction, ghetto lit, and gangsta lit” (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016, p. 319), signals to readers that certain types of Black girls have deep ties to urban geographies. As a result, notions of resilience in the face of more contemporary issues are reserved for Black girls “with some sort of social injury” (p. 319). Some spaces are unknown (and shall remain unknown), but should be used in classrooms. Through a Black feminist reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” Ohito (2016) brings attention to Black girl texts that can be incorporated into ELA classrooms. She asserts that Kincaid’s short story decenters the Western world and “confirms that other worlds beyond that which is governed by Man are not only present but also possible” (p. 450). As a result, texts like “Girl” open up conversations about Black Girl spaces of belonging and knowing. The ongoing challenge to Black Girl cartographers is making known (or marking) the additional geopolitical spaces where Black Girls thrive, make meaning, care for one another, and negotiate. Such texts can be incorporated not only into K–12 classrooms but also into teacher education programs in an effort to help preservice teachers envision, consider, and imagine multiple locations for Black Girlhood.

Similarly, Black Girl curricula can also prove to be rich ground to help Black girls develop strong sense of self, community, and vision for future possibilities. As cocreator of the Sisters of Promise curriculum, Nyachae (2016) and her partners place the stories and lived experiences of Black girls at the center of their teaching practices. The program curriculum, which was created by “Black women teachers for Black girls within the margins of school” (p. 787), intentionally takes account the girls’ sociocultural and geopolitical location—Black girls from the northeast region of the United States who qualified for free or reduced lunch. Through their work, Nyachae and her cofacilitators implemented a program that “empowers Black girls, exposes the oppression of Black women in contemporary American society, and critically examines the world as it relates to each Black girl’s intersectionality” (p. 794). The program engages in a “politics of spatiality” (Dotson, 2013) by considering each girl’s experience through the lenses of place, race, gender, and age. By “intentionally creating the afterschool space with and for Black girls to discuss theory, reflect upon experiences, and address societal issues” (Butler, 2016, p. 316), Nyachae and her cofacilitators reconstructed urban girls as cocreators of knowledge with ways of knowing, being, and critiquing arising from their experiences as Black girls from the northern United States.

Black Girl cartographers also highlight how Black girls engage in the interstitial spaces of multimodal curricula. By producing and disseminating more complex conceptions of Black Girlhood, girls often used digital tools to expand their sociogeopolitical boundaries and “functioned as conduits for circulating counternarratives to a global audience” (Price-Dennis, 2016, p. 358). For six girls participating in the summer “Facebook online street literature book club” (Greene, 2016, p. 279), the digital platform and its disconnection from school spaces offered them a “platform to focus on agency, identity construction, or meaning-making” (p. 285). Greene encourages educators to rethink how they ask Black girls to engage digital spaces. Instead of constructing assignments that are narrow in scope, function, and audience, educators are urged to “mirror the level of freedom of expression and linguistic autonomy often present in Black girls’ digital practices” (p. 285). Through such efforts, digital spaces emerge as good ground for the cultivation of Black Girls’ “radical creativity and incisive knowledge” (Dotson, 2014, p. 13; see also Phelps-Ward & Laura, 2016; Price-Dennis, 2016). By sifting through curricula created and facilitated by Black Girl cartographers, we learn about the interstitial spaces where we can seek, find, listen to, work alongside, and learn from Black girls across the field of education.

Futures of Black Girl Cartography in Education

Black Girl cartographers are committed to learning by walking alongside Black girls. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Henery (2011) learns how Black women’s physical labor and geopolitical knowledge shaped the community. As wives, mothers, and domestic laborers, the women’s footsteps carved out new pathways in the favelas in the form of “a geographic pattern, rhythm, and ethic of black women’s work that . . . gave shape to the neighborhood” (p. 92). By walking with the women, Henery recounts how “Black women’s social dynamics” (p. 92) shaped the Brazilian terrain. Similarly, Black Girl cartographers are “walking” with Black girls who are charting and shaping various terrains of learning. When education research works through the framework of Black Girl Cartography, we see where Black girls cultivate care that is rooted in justice, respect, reciprocity, and futurity. Seeing Black girls is the first required action in activism for and with Black girls, as it then pushes toward hearing girls, believing girls, understanding Black Girl matters, and articulating why Black girls matter. I return to McKittrick to think about implications for Black Girl matters, cartography, and the field of education.

If black women’s geographies illustrate that our ideological models and the three-dimensional physical world can, indeed, be alterable and reimagined, where do their sense of place, and their conceptual interventions take us? Can black women’s geographies also open up the possibility to rethink, and therefore respatialize, our present sociogeographic organization? (McKittrick, 2006, p. 122)

To answer McKittrick’s questions is to consider how education researchers can become ethical and responsible Black Girl cartographers. Part of ethical engagement is recognizing limits and learning to seek answers in new ways. With all the possibilities of Black Girl Cartography, I do recognize that cartography can be a limiting framework in that it may make static people who are in motion and occupying multiple spaces simultaneously, as well as try to make legible practices that are embodied, ever changing, and indescribable (as we do not yet have the language to effectively translate practices). Writing about the terrains through which Black girls travel and/or make is limited in that it is incapable of fully depicting the multidimensional practices, knowledges, and spaces of Black girlhood (Price-Dennis, Muhammad, Womack, McArthur, & Haddix, 2017). I acknowledge that there are several Black girls who are not “mapped” in this chapter, girls who are important to the framing of Black Girl Cartography. Therefore, the framework is in-flux and in-progress as it is being shaped by the cartographic knowledges of trans* Black girls, Black dis/abled girls, Black girls living outside of the United States, Black girls of various spiritual and religious beliefs, multilingual Black girls, and more. Charting their critical cartographic knowledges requires more conversations with scholars, researchers, and advocates who are walking alongside those who have not been mapped here.

Muhammad and Haddix (2016) assert, in their call for the centering of Black Girl literacies, that “if we reimagine English education where Black girls matter, all children would benefit from a curricular and pedagogical infrastructure that values humanity” (p. 329). Echoing the Combahee River Collective’s assertion that everyone else’s freedom would be a result of Black women’s freedom, Muhammad and Haddix remind us that each child’s education and liberation are connected to the education and liberation of Black girls. For example, Black Girl cartographers (Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2017; Morris, 2015; Wun, 2016) who examine the ways zero tolerance policies result in the overpolicing of Black girls in schools highlight how disciplinary responses push Black girlhood out of schooling landscapes. Their work calls into question why Black girls do not seem to matter in schools. Cartographers who focus on Black girls’ digital practices bring attention to how Black girls reclaim space and forge communities, especially if they have been physically or socially ostracized (Phelps-Ward & Laura, 2016; Greene, 2016). Collectively, Black Girl cartographers remind us that education research rooted in responsibility and critical reflexivity can contribute to the long-standing activism of Black women. Such work names the structures and institutions that are responsible for inequities, articulates how Black girls’ experiences are shaped by said structures, and considers how Black girls are working within/against the structures. Therefore, Black Girl cartographers are documenting the ways that Black girls are leading to more sustaining, holistic, and liberatory practices. In carrying the legacy of Harriet and unnamed liberators, Black Girl cartographers remember (and remind us) that everyone’s liberation is, and possibilities for liberatory education are, intricately linked to Black Girl knowledge.

Footnotes

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Black Girl Cartography: Black Girlhood and Place-Making in Education Research

Abstract

Black Girl Cartographies

Intersectional Black Feminisms 1 : Charting Resistance

Black Girl Cartography: Mapping Our Stories

Methods for Locating Black Girl Cartographers in Education Research

Black Girls Navigating Practices

Figured Worlds: Schools as Geopolitical Spaces

Navigational Practices

Black Girl Charting: Curricula and Digital Spaces

Futures of Black Girl Cartography in Education

Footnotes

Notes

References

Intersectional Black Feminisms¹: Charting Resistance