Where Can We Be? Black Girls (Re)Creating Space through Digital Practice 
Ashleigh Greene Wade, University of Virginia

How do Black girls carve out spaces for themselves within sociocultural contexts that encourage their silence and erasure? This talk highlights the role of digital practices in Black girls’ space-making techniques as an example of Black girl autopoetics. I coin the term Black girl autopoetics to name Black girls’ praxes of (re)creation and (re)invention of cultural products, spaces, and discourses through their subjective formation and expression. Using ethnographic data from Black girls in Richmond, Virginia alongside Black feminist approaches to geography, I theorize Black girls’ geographies through the inextricability of their digital content, physical environments, and worldviews. Drawing from Black girls’ posts on social media and the stories of their lived experiences, I construct a theory of the digital as both spatial and material to argue Black girls’ digital content operates as a map of the interconnected and multilayered spaces that they must navigate and create in ongoing processes of self-development and meaning-making. Ultimately, I show how Black girls deploy digital content creation as a way to (re)structure their spatial realities, thereby expanding places where they can simply be. 

Ashleigh Greene Wade is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Broadly speaking, her work traverses the fields of Black girlhood studies, digital and visual media studies, Black Feminist theory, and digital humanities. Wade has a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and is an alumna of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies Fellowship Program. Her work on Black cultural production appears in Cultural Studies, The Black Scholar, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Visual Arts Research, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and National Political Science Review. Wade’s debut monograph, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice (Duke University Press), explores the role of Black girls’ digital practices in documenting and preserving everyday Black life.