Second Annual Black Feminist Methods and Methodologies Working Symposium: Black Girlhood and Black Girlhood Studies, an Introduction with Selected Abstracts

The Issue (Because Black Girls Are Not the Problem)

Sponsored by the callie house research center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics, the second annual Black Feminist Methods and Methodologies Working Symposium held at Vanderbilt University in October 2017 focused on black girls and black girlhood. A symposium developed as a space for early to midcareer black women scholars to present their works in progress, the interdisciplinary two-day gathering featured speakers from education, history, and literary and women's and gender studies. A significant and necessary purpose of the working symposium on black girls and girlhood was to disrupt the disappearing and devaluing of black girls and women within academic research and in program-based settings.

Educational researcher Ruth Nicole Brown argues that black girls are the experts on their own lives. The problem is there is often no place for the narratives of black girls to be discussed, documented, and disseminated. In the work engaged by these black women scholars, a cacophony of innovative theories and methodologies were presented and discussed. The work of these scholars is a critical and intentional attempt to broaden the aperture into the academic research about black girls by being intentionally inclusive of a black girlhood that matters.

Selected Abstracts

LeConté J. Dill, Assistant Professor of Public Health at SUNY Downstate, "# BlackGirlBe!"

The concept of resilience describes the dynamic process of individuals and communities to adapt positively and successfully despite adversities. My ongoing research in this area begins to shift our thinking toward the mechanisms and strategies that youth of color and communities of color, in particular, activate in the pursuit of wellness and healthy living. My work in progress is based upon my committed engagement with African American, Caribbean American, West African immigrant, and Latinx youth residing in urban neighborhoods on the West Coast, the South, and Northeast US. I argue that young people's active participation in their individual and collective processes of "resistance" and "hope" have been missing from the resilience literature and discourse.

Many of the analyses of structural oppressions impacting urban youth of color undertheorize the explicit role of gender and sexism in exacerbating inequities and in impacting opportunities for survival. My work in progress is firmly rooted in the epistemologies of black feminist thought and black girlhood studies. This work refuses blackgirlhoods as solely invisible, hypervisible, "at risk," and/or dehumanized. I strive to be a worthy witness of drylongso urban blackgirlhoods—being an observant participant of how "regular, degular, shmegular" urban black girls be! This work in progress reconstitutes urban blackgirlhood as resistance and as hopefulness, which I assert are processes of safety, of healing, and of wellness.

Heidi R. Lewis, Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Feminist and Gender Studies, Colorado College, "The Tarajia Project Then and Now: Black Feminist Reflections on Service to Young Black Women and Girls"

Last fall, Ben Fields, a Richland County police officer, was terminated after he was caught on videotape slamming a black girl student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina while she was still seated in her chair after she refused to surrender her cellular phone. Solicitor Dan Johnson said in a twelve-page court report last month that he found no probable cause to charge the disgraced school resource officer. On the one hand, Fields's supervisor, Sheriff Leon Lott—who said he wanted to "throw up" upon seeing the video—was so outraged that he fired him and called on the FBI and the Justice Department for help. On the other hand, Lott was also critical of the student, claiming, "She is responsible for initiating this." These kinds of attacks on young black women and girls, which often go ignored in mainstream media outlets, demonstrate the many ways in which black women and girls are denied humanity and sympathy. I reference this particular moment, because it caused me to think more seriously and critically about my own work with black...