Journeying: how Black girls make sense of schooling injustice through movement

How do Black girls make sense of the injustices that shape their schooling and neighborhood experiences? Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 45 high school-aged Black girls in the New York City metro area, this study argues that Black girls draw on their movement through urban space to make meaning of and develop critiques of anti-Blackness and educational injustice. Specifically, I find that participants routinely navigate multiple institutional spaces and that these spatial navigations offer them the opportunity to contrast the resources and treatments made available to them and those afforded to other youth and institutions within and beyond their cities. I theorize this meaning-making process as journeying, a theoretical concept that highlights the merging between Black girls’ physical travels and their shifting perceptions of school and social locations. In identifying the role of movement in Black girls’ development of critical consciousness, this study contributes to research on how Black youth can develop the insights to counter the stereotypes, negative representations, and anti-Black policies and practices that they encounter in their daily routines.