Reimagining the Way Forward: Writing as Refusal in Chosen Youth Spaces

• In Event: Composing Futures: Children, Youth, and Teachers Dreaming Educational Justice in and Through Writing

Abstract

Purpose
In this paper I examine Black youth writing and spoken word as a form of refusal (Simpson 2007; Shange, 2019) and a tool for reimagining more just learning environments. Within a chosen, community-based organization, Black girl organizers engaged in poetry writing and performance to process and reject anti-Black schooling practices and to reimagine more just learning spaces. Through their writing, Black girls rendered themselves legible.

Theoretical Framework
This paper brings notions of refusal (Simpson, 2007; Shange, 2019) into conversation with perspectives on Black girls’ writing, including legibility (Spillers, 1987; Cox, 2015) and Black girl navigational practices (Butler, 2018). Black girls’ refusals disrupt the non-consent they experience in US compulsory schools. In this paper, I consider how Black girls refuse their racialized and gendered invisibility, using subversive writing (Kelly, 2020) to render themselves legible. As a navigational practice, I consider how writing helped Black girls refuse deficit framings of themselves, writing themselves whole.

Methods & Data Sources
This study drew on humanizing ethnographic methods (Paris & Winn, 2014) with six Black youth teen community organizers (ages 13-17 years old) over the course of four months. Data sources included field notes from teen community organizing meetings (Bhattacharya, 2017), qualitative interviews with Black girl participants (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014), and samples of participants’ poetry and spoken word performances (Leavy, 2015). Through three cycles of coding, I created initial inductive codes, consolidated codes and identified patterns, and then integrated theory to generate themes (Miles et al., 2014). Throughout the process and where possible, I included youth participants in data collection and analysis, considering methods themselves as a form of refusal to ‘traditional’ research methods that create incongruous and harmful researcher-participant power relationships.

Findings
Across the data, I identified three major themes: key ways of knowing, relationships as sustenance, and critical consent and reimagining. First, through their writing and spoken word, Black girl participants refused compulsory schooled logics of individual expression and evaluation, instead inviting each other to speak, creating space for consent and refusal, and respecting each others’ voices. Second, as they processed anti-Black teaching and learning practices through their writing, Black girl participants expressed appreciation for their relationships with one another and the group as a form of nourishment and healing. Third, using poetic agency, Black girl participants defined themselves outside of the white gaze, cultivating a practice of using their poetry to read the world and fully control their narratives as they spoke back to the injustices they experienced.

Significance
Through their writing, Black girl participants envisioned the kind of futures they were actively advocating for as community organizers, pushing back against compulsory schooling practices and policies. In this way, Black girls’ writing was a navigational practice, used to address anti-Black logics and harmful circumstances, rendering themselves legible. This paper contributes to understandings of what becomes possible when Black girls’ refusals are welcomed and encouraged, and when youth do not have to primarily focus their attention on survival within white, patriarchal context of K-12 compulsory learning spaces.

Author

• Jazmen Moore, University of Washington - Seattle