UCLA

Hidden Roses centers the narratives of a purposive sample of Black girls (n=13) with discipline records to understand how these students name and construct knowledge about the punishment and everyday misogynoir they face at an urban high school. Their reflections on Desert Rose High School, a high school where Black girls are suspended at one of the highest rates in Southern California (CDE, 2018), provide an in-depth examination of how Black girls who face exclusionary punishments live and interpret the school/prison nexus phenomenon. Guided by the Matrix of Domination theory (Collins, 1990, 2000), this multi-method critical case study interrogates systems of schooling as oppressive structures that perpetuate intersecting and layered forms of violence against Black girls along the axes of race, gender, class, age, and place. Additionally, this research examines Black girls’ engagement in the Concrete Rose Project, an after school-based Black-girlhood-centered counter space to explore how youth participants use CRP as a site of epistemic agency, resistance, and placemaking (Butler, 2018; Hunter et al., 2016; McKittrick, 2006). In so doing, this dissertation expands upon the work of Black Feminist Thought and contributes to the emerging body of theoretical scholarship about Black Girlhoods by centering the Concrete Rose Project Black girls as contributors of their own intellectual and activist tradition. Data from this dissertation reveal how Black girls conceptualize a theory of power that accounts for how anti-Black racism, misogynoir, and classism operate as structural conditions in their everyday schooling experiences, rendering them vulnerable to excessive punishment and dehumanizing learning conditions. The dissertation offers research, policy, practice recommendations for future examinations of these issues.