ISD5: Collectively Envisioning Black Girl Futures

Collaborative Goals

Despite fragmented images of Black girls in schools and society, Black girls continue to dream about the futures they want to see for themselves (Turner & Griffin, 2020) and Black women dream alongside them. Thus, as a collective of Black women scholars and community members within and beyond Central New York, our Working Group has three aims:

• Reflect and remember our Black girlhoods;
• Speculate on Black girl futures through the arts; and
• Engage in readers workshops that center Black women writers and inform a way forward for Black girl community work.

We will also continue to invite guests from outside of the Corridor, to include Black women who work with Black girls in academic and community contexts. By centering the works of Black women artists and authors who speculate on Black imaginations and futures, we have had the opportunity to foster a space of remembering to collectively envision a way forward for Black girls in all spaces. To that end, we desire to utilize this phase of our working group to bridge the intrapersonal reflections of our group and interpersonal community building to foster intergenerational conversation with middle and high school aged Black girls from Central New York (including Ithaca, Syracuse, and Binghamton).