“I rewrote their story and you can, too”: Black girls’ artistic freedom dreams to create new worlds

Abstract

For Black girls, whose histories are often taught in schools through deficit-based narratives, the need to create and reauthor their personal and communal stories is a resistant act that gives their stories permanence in the present and the future. This article explores how Black girls leveraged creative expression to freedom dream in a virtual summer arts program. Theoretically grounded in Abolitionist Teaching and Critical Race Feminism, this study explored eight adolescent Black girls’ (co-researchers) experiences in Black Girls S.O.A.R. (scholarship, organizing, arts, and resistance), a program aimed to co-create a healing-centered space to engage artistic explorations of history, storytelling, Afrofuturism, and social justice with Black girls. The study utilizes performance ethnography to contend with the following research question: (1) How, if at all, do adolescent Black girls use arts-based practices (e.g., visual art, music, hair, and animation) to freedom dream? Analyses of the data revealed that co-researchers used arts-based practices to reclaim personal and historical narratives, dream new worlds, and use art as activism. In this, co-researchers created futures worthy of Black girl brilliance—futures where joy, creativity, equity, and love were at the center. I conclude with implications for how educators and researchers can employ creative, participatory, and arts-based practices and methodologies in encouraging and honoring Black girls’ storytelling and dream-making practices.

Seeing Black Girls in Their Glory: Cultivating Spaces that Facilitate Black Girls’ Psychological Safety

“…As Black girls learn about what it means to be unsafe, they can better understand the social and structural conditions that threaten their safety and consider the necessary changes in their social relationships and contexts to ensure their safety and well-being (Price-Dennis et al, 2017). Even as Black girls experience and acknowledge intersectional oppression, they maintain a sense of radical hope (i.e., envisioning socially just worlds) by engaging in practices like creating visionary fiction, art-making, and curating spaces that prioritize their liberation and healing (Kaler-Jones, 2022; Toliver, 2022).…”