JWJI Colloquium featuring Ashleigh Greene Wade

From the venue:

Talk Title:

(Re)Creating Spaces of Black Girlhood

------

How do Black girls carve out spaces for themselves within sociocultural contexts that encourage their silence and erasure? This talk highlights the role of digital practices in Black girls’ space-making techniques as an example of Black girl autopoetics. The term Black girl autopoetics is coined to name Black girls’ praxes of (re)creation and (re)invention of cultural products, spaces, and discourses through their subjective formation and expression. Using ethnographic data from Black girls in Richmond, Virginia alongside Black feminist approaches to geography, Black girls’ geographies are theorized through the inextricability of their digital content, physical environments, and worldviews. Drawing from Black girls’ posts on social media and the stories of their lived experiences, a theory of the digital as both spatial and material is constructed to argue that Black girls’ digital content operates as a map of the interconnected and multilayered spaces that they must navigate and create in ongoing processes of self-development and meaning-making. Ultimately, it is shown how Black girls deploy digital content creation as a way to (re)structure their spatial realities, thereby expanding places where they can simply be.