“Nobody even stops to think about my side of it”: To what extent can poetry foster epistemic justice for Black girls attending a public high school in Texas?

Abstract

This doctoral thesis explores the intersecting axes of Blackness, femininity, youth, and class, where the epistemic claims of Black girls are, within an academic landscape, routinely shaped by white, adult authority (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 2000). Denied epistemic authority, Black girls are frequently cast as unreliable narrators of their own lives, subjected to both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, which entrenches harmful stereotypes of hypersexuality, aggression and premature adulthood (Fricker, 2007; Morris, 2016; Epstein et al., 2017). In response, this arts- based research, conducted in a Texas public high school, specifically Dallas, used poetic inquiry as its primary methodology. Through a series of after-school poetry workshops, Black girls created original poems that, alongside ethnographic observation, audio recordings, the researcher’s own poetic fragments, and reflexive journalling, form the core empirical findings, which are presented through narrative storytelling. An autoethnographic strand runs through the study, interwoven with ethnographic approaches, situating the researcher’s lived experience as an integral part of the analytic process. The study examines how poetic inquiry can facilitate epistemic justice by enabling participants to express lived experience and assert knowledge claims grounded in Black feminist ways of knowing (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1989). Framed by epistemic justice and Black feminist epistemology (Fricker, 2007; Collins, 2000), the research also investigates how intersecting structures of racism, sexism, adultism and classism shape Black girls’ school and social realities (Crenshaw, 1989; Fordham, 1993). Ultimately, the study argues that poetry, as a liberatory and relational method, can support Black girls in reclaiming voice, resisting dominant constructions of girlhood, and producing counter-narratives that challenge deficit-based, exclusionary framings (Epstein et al., 2017; Harris-Perry, 2011; King, 1988).