The Gift of Their Visions: The Stories That Black Girls Can Imagine in Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Worlds That Black Girls Deserve: Working With Black Girls Toward Black Girl Futures

Abstract

Objectives
This paper is based on a graphic novel, Free Money, imagined by three Black girls who participated in a SSHRC-funded project titled, Making Sense of Movements. In this project, we worked with Black and Indigenous young people living in Toronto to make sense of Black and Indigenous social movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, and the impact of these social movements in young peoples’ lives, communities, and futures. This paper shares the imaginative visions of three Black girls who tell a story about their relationships to place, their communities, and friends. This story also shares their ideas about justice, injustice, and care. This paper offers an example of what is made possible when Black girls participating in youth participatory action research are invited to engage arts-based practices and the imagination as creative tools to build more just futures.

Theoretical framework
The primary theoretical framework that will be engaged is Youth Participatory Action Research (yPAR), which informs Making Sense of Movements. yPAR creates space and opportunities for young people to analyze the social problems that impact their lives, to study such problems as produced rather than natural, and to think about solutions to fix the problems. (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). As such, young people are engaged as experts of their own lives and the social worlds they inhabit. In this paper, I also draw on the theoretical works of Black feminist scholars and fiction writers (Gumbs, 2016, 2018, 2020; Hartman, 2019; Morrison, 1995) who theorize the imagination as a method to build life-affirming conditions and futures for Black women and girls.

Methods and Materials
This paper draws on a graphic novel, Free Money, imagined by three youth co-researchers through visual methods. Engaging visual research methods was a way for youth to assess the injustices they experience as Black and Indigenous young people and make connections between such injustice. Visual research uses visual tools “as modes of inquiry [and] modes of representation…in research related to social change” (Mitchell, 2011).
Free Money was imagined during an arts-based workshop with a graphic illustrator from Toronto. This workshop was a part of a series of arts-based workshops for young people in Making Sense of Movements to learn about arts-based practices from community artists.

Results
This study and this paper make clear that Black girls are social and political actors. Black girls hold expertise that is lived and place-based. In more detail, Black girls know and care a lot about the places that they live and the communities that they are a part of. This knowledge and care shapes what they imagine in Free Money.

Significance
This significance of this paper is to: (1) Highlight the creative and arts-based contributions that three Black girls made in Making Sense of Movements, (2) To center the visionary imaginaries of three Black girls in Free Money, and (3) To highlight the possibilities that creative and arts-based spaces make possible for young people fighting against systems of oppression and desiring more just worlds.

Author

• Jade Toneshia Nixon, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author