Little women?: Gendered racial capitalism and the adultification of Black African girls in UN reports

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity and Identity in Politics, Policy and Practice

Proposal

As an integrated field and domain of knowledge, Comparative Education (CE) and International Education (IE) (e.g, CIE) is most-often concerned with investigation into educational policy and practice emerging at the national encounter (Wiseman & Anderson, 2014). And, relatedly, scholarship in the field has long been focused on the activities of teaching, learning, and schooling as national endeavors, accomplished by and within nation-states, and sometimes in relation with other identified nation-states. While some notion of difference is embedded in this conversation, for a long time and in many sectors of the field, a real attention to the racial contours of power in CIE has been absent (Sripakash, Tickly & Walker, 2020; Strong et al., 2023). More recently, scholars working in CIE with academic backgrounds in gender studies, Black studies, postcolonial studies, and the like have begun to apply critical theoretical framing rooted in cultural studies to understand transnational educational phenomena (see Andreotti et al., 2018; Shahjahan & Edwards, 2021; Stein et al., 2019). And this expansion, in tandem with the growth of girl- and girlhood-focused studies in CIE (Mitchell & Rentschler, 2016), has invited more (and necessary) critical engagement with transnational Black girlhoods within girls’ education policy and international development (Anderson, 2016; Vanner, 2019; Silver, 2021; Seraphin, 2023). This labor has produced rigorous analyses of the ways in which “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2015) continues to shape educational policy and practice within, between, and across national borders.

Academic entreaties like these have paved the way for more critical engagements with how we perceive comparative and international education as a field and understand its relationship/adjacency to women’s and gender studies. As scholars of gender and Black studies, as well as international and comparative educational studies, our academic situatedness reveals much to us about the ways that global power dynamics, re/production value, de/sub/anti-humanization, and the long durée of colonial expansion are woven in and through girls’ education policy, globally. In order to better elucidate this idea, we apply Cedric Robinson’s (1983) notion of racial capitalism, in particular the approaches to this concept taken up by Black feminists (i.e. ‘gendered racial capitalism,’ see Haley, 2021; Kelley, 2024; Thompson, 2023, etc.). Through Robinson’s critique we see the ways in which the racial othering of girls in the Global South is fundamentally linked to capitalist accumulation and the ongoing exploitation of the (pre-) laborer. The Global Goals - United Nations’ 30-year plan to combat global poverty – incentivized girls’ access to education as a pathway to promote women’s economic opportunity, and in so doing, narrowed the terms of empowerment to girls’ future labor market participation as women (Anderson, 2021). The empowerment logic of the gender-focused Goals remind us of ‘adultification’ as articulated in Black studies, the notion that Black children are never allowed childhood in an antiBlack world (Epstein, Blake, & González, 2017). Unlike their white counterparts in the Global North - who are presumed a right to girlhood and therefore are not imaged or targeted as a population of interest to the Global Goals – Black girls in the Global South are cast as resources for colonial expansion and as objects of development. In this project, we trouble the UN’s construction/s of Black African girlsandwomen as development subjects as fundamentally rooted in an imperialist notion of the productive labor-er.

Using secondary (document) and primary (visual) qualitative analyses, we explore the question, “What roles do subjects (Black African girlsandwomen) get to play (are forced to play) in the capitalist project?”. Our secondary (document) analysis involves text sourced from UN Women’s Annual Reports published from 2010 – 2020. The archival document corpus was first constructed in 2014 to study dominant girls’ education policy discourse diffusion over time and place (Anderson, 2022). It was updated in (2021) to include all Annual Reports published by UN Women in the intervening period (2014 – 2020). Annual Reports are (re)read as organizational histories that artifact UN Women’s engagement in cross-sectorial policy making and programmatic support for girls’ education and women’s economic empowerment over the last decade. Vila-Henninger and colleagues (2024) define secondary qualitative analysis as “the use of already produced qualitative data to develop new social scientific and/or methodological understandings.” (p. 969). We use abduction as a secondary qualitative analysis procedure to locate racial capitalism within the dominant discourses used to improve Black African girls’ access to school, and Black African women’s economic participation. Abduction is a systematic revisitation of existent qualitative data. It originated in/through grounded theory as an organizing process for constant comparison: a coding approach used to identify and refine emergent theoretical cases. We adapt Timmermans and Tavory’s (2012) abductive protocol to organize the secondary document analysis. In abducting the archival document corpus, this study reconsiders the relationships between international development and education policymaking by theorizing the primacy of racial capitalism within the girls’ education expansion project.

We couple the (secondary) archival document analysis with a (primary) visual case analysis of Black African girlsandwomen’s roles within UN Women’s work in Africa during the Global Goals. Visual cases (Magno & Kirk, 2008; 2010) are sourced from the Decade of Daring report published by UN Women in 2020 to commemorate its 10th anniversary. Visual cases within the document were sorted into two descriptive subgroups: images of single subjects, and images of assembled subjects. After subgroup sorting, cases were coded through three iterative rounds. In the first round, subject and subgroup inclusion criteria were (re)confirmed through a close and careful (line-by-line) (re)reading of each image alongside any accompanying text. Our emerging analysis shows – through words and pictures - how the UN’s logic of girls’ education in Africa is inextricably linked to a neoliberal agenda concerned with the production of Black women as private laborers.

Authors

• Emily W. Anderson, Florida International University

• Kirsten T. Edwards, Florida International University