Joy is a place we make: Exploring sisterhood and political imagination in Black college women's placemaking

• In Event: Archive to Unforget: Educational Geographies of Remembering, Reclaiming & the Recovery of Our Collective Memory

Abstract

Young Black women have helped to transform urban places (Isoke, 2013). Despite a rich history, scholarship has not adequately explored how Black college women conceptualize and reflect on spatialized oppression or enact joy, liberation and justice-oriented practices through (re)making these places. This study explores how 12 Black women activists enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs in large cities navigate, imagine, and re(make) city and campus places. Each participant completed a two-part interview. The first phase was a participatory map-making exercise that contextualized participants’ ideas and stories about their cities, universities, and campus- adjacent neighborhoods. The second phase explored the ways that social identities (e.g., race and gender) and spatial context (i.e., cities and urban universities) inform the sociopolitical understandings of participants. Guided by a theoretical conversation on Black placemaking (Tichavakunda, 2021) and Black Girl cartography (Butler 2018), I analyzed these narratives to answer a central question: How do Black women’s experiences in urban universities influence their spatial understanding of (in)justice, their beliefs about their capacity to (re)make these places, and the actions they take to create them? Through making maps and telling stories, participants described the interconnected nature of campuses and cities and how these locales both constrained everyday acts of joy, while being sites of imagination and placemaking.
Participants describe navigating racialized and gendered geographies, creating cartographies and geographies of resistance and joy though political imagination, and describe Black sisterhood as a place of socialization, sociopolitical action, hope, joy, and safety. Two important contributions emerged from these findings. First, participants conceptualized sisterhood as a dynamic and mobile form of place. Second, for these participants political imaginations are central to Black placemaking. Although Black sisterhoods may fall outside of what we consider ‘place,’ these were sites from which participants launched Black placemaking activities and healed from activist work. In examining these sisterhoods using Black Girl cartography, we may indeed theorize these sisterhoods as sites of relational knowledge making (Butler, 2018). These sisterhoods offered participants a living and co-constructed place of joy, healing, and rest. Moreover, their political imagination (Scott et al., 2023) was central to creating Black places on college campus. Beyond being able to articulate a desire, imagining better places helped participants to confront the material and institutional realities they would face to create them.

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Isoke, Z. (2013) Urban black women and the politics of resistance. New York, NY: Palgrave
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Scott, E. D., Harris, J., Smith, C. D., & Ross, L. (2023). Facing the rising sun: Political
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Tichavakunda, A. A. (2021). Black joy on white campuses: Exploring Black students'
recreation and celebration at a historically white institution. The Review of Higher
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Author

• Gordon Palmer, University of Illinois at Chicago