Journeying: Black girlhood, movement and the refusal of (in)justice

Social scientists have long documented how Black youth’s emplacements in racially and socioeconomically segregated neighborhoods and schools limit their educational opportunities and academic outcomes. Yet, these discrete studies of race and place leave unexamined the many other spaces where youth learn, and how their emplacement in multiple educational sites informs their approaches to formal schooling. This study advances sociological research by analyzing how Black girls draw on their movement through urban space to identify and challenge injustice. Using ethnographic methods, I trace how 45 multi-ethnic Black girls in the New York City Metro area move between and navigate four formal and informal educational spaces: homes, schools, social media, and the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, an afterschool program that fosters critical consciousness and activism among youth of color in New York City and Newark, NJ. My findings reveal that high school-aged Black girls routinely navigate multiple spaces of advantage and disadvantage and that their movement between these spaces offers them the opportunity to encounter and make sense of inequality. I argue that this movement further informs their racial identities, injustice perceptions, and protest strategies— a concept I theorize as journeying. This study contributes to research in sociology and education by offering a theoretical lens for understanding Black youth resistance to educational injustice. It also positions journeying through informal educational spaces as an empowering process that offers Black girls the tools to activate their agency, develop positive self-actualizations, and actively challenge hostile schooling.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference