Difficult Names: Women and Girls of Color Naming Their Truths

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The four papers in this panel explore the multiple ways GOC and WOC name themselves in defiance of the too-often short sighted definitions used to inform school policy, pedagogies, and practices. Using WOC feminist frameworks the papers illuminate how intersecting oppressions interact to inform the conditions in which GOC and WOC exist, while simultaneously exploring the multiple knowledges they inherent, reinvent, and hybridize as a product of their raced-gendered experiences and histories. In turn, we understand the ways WOC and GOC explore and express their truths are complex and often multimodal, encompassing traditional pen and paper literacies alongside embodied, relational, experiential, digital, and arts-based literacies that transcend eurocentric and dominant school-based knowledges.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chairs

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut

• Autumn A. Griffin, Georgia State University

Papers

• "You Have No Right to Deprive Me of My Name": Girls of Color Claiming Themselves and Their Truths Toward Sisterhood - Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut

• Naming and Claiming space: Latina/x Girls Transforming Museum Curation and Space - Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jiadi Zhang, University of Missouri - St. Louis; Citlalli Garcia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Your Name Is a Song: (Re)Membering Black Girls' Names - Autumn A. Griffin, Georgia State University

• My Name Means Reciprocity: Autoethnographic Reflections of Being Black, Fat, Female, and Locked In During the Pandemic(s) - Dywanna Smith, Claflin University

Discussant

• Victoria Gill, Lesley University