A Space of Our Own: Refusal, Surveillance, and a Black Girl Sense of Place

• In Event: Neoliberal Care as Punishment: Abolition Feminist Interrogations of the “Benevolent” Carceral State

Abstract

Amoni Thompson-Jones will examine how Black girlhood contributes to the radical imagination of freedom. She explores this idea through interviews, focus groups, and observational analysis within the context of education-based, nonprofit programs in the contemporary US South. Her paper explores how both the nonprofit industrial complex and U.S. education systems extend practices of policing and surveillance that specifically target Black girlhood. Her work uses Black feminist theory and Black Geographies to name the ways Black girls navigate and resist anti-black disciplinary practices of containment and repression to continue the Black radical tradition of freedom dreams and place-making. Amoni’s research seeks to extend the work of Katherine McKittrick (2011) and her concept of a “black sense of place” to think about the ways Black girls are theorizing a “black [girl] sense of place” through strategies of creative embodiment.

Author

• Amoni Miriam Thompson, University of California-Santa Barbara