Dreaming While Black: Intersectionality, Identity, and Imagination in Black Teen Girls' Digital Career Dream Boards

• In Event: 66.085 - Multimodal Methods and Meanings: Expanding Critical Understandings of Students' Lifeworlds Through Visual Artifacts

Abstract

Career aspirations and goals are key components of the identities adolescent youth envision for their adult futures (Author, 2017). For Black girls, however, these career aspirations are often gendered and racialized, as Black women are underrepresented in leadership positions in the workforce (Farinde, 2012). This presentation foregrounds digital and multimodal literacy practices of two teenage Black girls to examine their career aspirations and goals – which we refer to as career dreams. In particular, we use intersectionality (Collins, 2002; Crenshaw, 1989) to theorize how Black girls counter the stereotypical images perpetuated in society (e.g., Black girls are unintelligent) by agentively drawing upon their experiential knowledge to determine their own representations of self, future, and work. Our research is also situated within a burgeoning body of scholarship on Black girls’ digital literacies, which illustrates how technological literacies become a means for Black girls to express, modify, and we argue, imagine, the self (Greene, 2016; Muhammad & Womack, 2015; Scott, 2005; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Together, these frameworks permit us to discover the ways in which digital mediums facilitate space for two Black girls to imagine their future career identities and literacies.
Our presentation features two Black teen girls who participated in the Author’s (2012) study. As young children, Essence dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, while Ebony aspired to be a gymnastics coach. We conducted a follow up study with the girls based on this primary research question: In what ways do Ebony and Essence use visual images and digital literacy practices to (re)imagine their future career identities? Drawing on case study methodologies informed by critically conscious methods (Willis et. al, 2008) we asked Ebony and Essence to create digital dream boards using Padlet, an application used to create online bulletin boards, and conducted both individual and focus group interviews to understand how the use of digital collage allowed the girls to express, modify, and imagine their future selves in professional workplaces. The girls were encouraged to use multimodal and visual resources to represent intersectional future identities (e.g., raced, gendered, career-based) including photos, videos, songs, and word graphics.
Following Ajayi’s (2015) process of critical multimodal analysis, we examined the perceptual, structural, and ideological dimensions of the digital collages and used the interview transcripts to triangulate and extend the visual data. More specifically, we examined how the girls visually and multimodally design multiple literate Discourses (Gee, 1996), including those related to professional workplaces and career identities, youth culture, and family/community, in ways that illuminate agentive and emancipatory life trajectories. Our findings indicate that Ebony and Essence used multimodal digital literacy practices to (a) “restory” narratives about careers typically dominated by White people by inserting themselves into these future trajectories (b) design aspirational identities that underscore their intersectionality (i.e. Black, Christian girls who are scientists, artists, and athletes); and (c) highlight music as a tool for sustained motivation and future-making.

Authors

• Jennifer Danridge Turner, University of Maryland - College Park

• Autumn Griffin, University of Maryland - College Park