Charting an Otherwise: Black Girls Designing for Collective Access

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

Abstract

By learning with and from the work of a group of Black teen girls who are community organizers and artists, this paper attends to the ways that youth help us shift from individualism to collective action through a reframing of our understanding of space and its potential to facilitate care. The youth involved in this project, known as the “Teen Advisory Team,” (TAT) were originally invited to join an advisory committee for the proposed rebuild of a local park in their community to make it more accessible for children and adults with disabilities. Through their collective wisdom, advocacy, and knowledge of their community, the TAT challenged other members of the park redesign project to prioritize design practices that engage with race, class, and gender, in relation to disability (Annamma, 2018), and to approach the overall design process using a disability justice framework (Morales and Langstaff, 2018). Through their shared work on the park redesign project, the TAT members also began charting new spaces in the context of their relationships and school community to practice collective care, engage in shared meaning making practices, and disrupt the normalization of antiblack models of school curriculum, instruction, and discipline.

Working with six Black youth teen community organizers (ages 13-17 years old) over the course of five months, I drew on critical ethnographic methods (Bhattacharya, 2017) and utilized arts-based research design (Barone & Eisner, 2012) for this study. Data sources included field notes from community organizing meetings, qualitative interviews with youth collaborators (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014), and samples of youth collaborators’ poems (Leavy, 2015) that they wrote and performed during poetry workshops incorporated into community organizing meetings.
While working on the park project, members of the TAT also charted new ways to be in relationship with each other, which transformed their roles in each other’s lives from neighbors and peers, to friends they described as being “like family.” Further, through their community organizing and arts based engagement through poetry and performance, the TAT members also participated in shared meaning making practices that helped them advocate for design choices in their schools and community that prioritized collective access and collective liberation, and that rejected ableism and antiblackness. This study offers important implications for how we, as educators, can learn from the ways Black girls interweave their knowledge of care and space as a tool of analysis to address interlocking systems of oppression through design, while simultaneously building sustaining relationships with one another.

Author

• Jazmen Moore, Stony Brook University - SUNY