Not a Monolith: Exploring Black Women's and Girls' Varied Identities in a Literacy Collaborative

• In Event: Telling Our Own Stories, Together: Singularity and Solidarity in Literacy Collectives

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes:
By depicting Black people through a monolithic and deficit lens, the academy has long inflicted violence on communities of color, specifically Black folks (Banks, 2006; Delpit, 2006). Critical Black researchers have worked to interrogate power dynamics in relationships between researchers and the researched to mediate exploitative relationships and to produce research that shares the nuanced and powerful stories of Black people (Irizzary & Brown, 2013). With this study, I extend this line of work by interrogating my positionality in relationship to 9 adolescent Black girls and exploring the girls’ nuanced identities within their Black girlhood.

Perspectives and theoretical framework:
This work engages 3 theoretical perspectives: (1) outsider within (Siddle-Walker, 2005); (2) Black Feminist (Collins, 1990) and Black Girlhood studies (Brown, 2009); and (3) critical multimodal literacy (Ajayi, 2015). As a Black woman, I understand that my geographic, generational, and educational statuses vary greatly from those of my research partners and shape how I see and understand the world. Further, I draw on these perspectives to analyze how race, gender, and age shape our experiences and outlooks as well as how the girls employed multiple texts to (re)write and (re)construct monolithic deficit depictions of Black girlhood.

Methods:
I employ critical autoethnography to examine my relationship to my research partners and focus on how my unique status as an outsider within (Siddle Walker, 2005) both enhance my understanding of the data and contribute to the questions that emerged from our time together. Further, I use a critical multimodal lens to frame how research partners articulated ideas about identity through literary renderings (Ajayi, 2015; [Author, 2020]).
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data were collected during a 15-week literacy collaborative with 9 adolescent Black girls. Meetings took place on Friday mornings at a mid-Atlantic public charter school, where we gathered over weekly meals to discuss themes related to Black girlhood, self-love, and literacy. Although multiple sources of data were collected, I draw largely from field notes, memos, and student artifacts.

Results & Significance:
Analysis of the data revealed that generational status and geographical origin play a large role in shaping the beliefs and practices of individuals and thus relationships within the collaborative. Further, analysis revealed that although research partners shared racial and gendered identities, and appreciated a space where they could discuss and be affirmed in those identities, they diverged both in how they understood those identities and who they saw themselves to be as individuals. This project has significance for how researchers understand their positionalities as different from those with whom they work and the differences within groups of people with whom they work.

Author

• Autumn Adia Griffin