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

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight how young people engage in social justice work. This study is guided by the following question: how do students engage in the social justice work of storytelling through art? Design/methodology/approach The title stems from a conversation the researcher had with the four female students about whether they identified themselves as activists. After the students collectively agreed that they did not align with the term “activist”, they continued to grapple with definitions of the word and discussed other terms to describe themselves. The conversation is one of many that emerged from a three-year qualitative research project that focused on youth activism, which included a one-year critical narrative inquiry into a ninth-grade Humanities classroom. Findings This paper positions the artwork as activism, in that the girls embedded multiple narratives into their art to portray a complex narrative about the realities of sex trafficking in their community. Research limitations/implications The paper will conclude with implications that focus on the importance of blurring the boundaries between classrooms and communities, cultivating spaces for young people to develop an activist stance and working alongside youth as they compose political–personal stories about injustice, inequality and inequities in their fights for social change. Originality/value This paper offers a unique discussion of artmaking (collective biography) as a form of socially just youth literacy. As such, interstitial literacies become the acts of speaking, reading, writing and being that youth/students create and engage in as they move between classrooms and communities.

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This article narrates the contours of a digital “kitchen table talk”–a conversation that brought together WoC from various areas of literacy and language education to discuss the state of the field and the next steps in transforming literacy studies and education for GFoC. Using bell hooks’s concept of “homeplace,” we bring together the reflections of eleven WoC across intersected Black, Latina, and Asian identities to examine the realities of GFoC, the urgency around their lives and needs, as well as self-examination of our role in the academy taking up feminist projects with GFoC.