Our feminist youth engagement work and participatory research was situated within a program model, Public Achievement (PA), born from the brilliance of Black women educators and organizers during the Civil Rights Movement. Our movement ancestors paved the way and shared feminist theory and practices for social change across time, rooted in the knowing that education is a vehicle for freedom.…

This research zine is a creative essay about feminist daughterhood based on my dissertation research with activist girls and their mothers and mother figures. I chose to centre my analysis on the relationships between activist girls and their mothers and mother figures because mother-daughter relationships are not well explored in the field of girls’ studies. Girls inherit the social problems…

“Cariño! Let’s go forest bathing,” a student shouts as she enters the classroom. I look at the Cultural Energizer (warm up) to see what I’ve planned and decide to forego it. This is typical, the young women of color in the class dictating what we should do everyday. Some days they might want to talk about the current event, others…

PIP [Power, Identity, and Privilege] was my foundation for activism. It gave me the knowledge,the strength, and even the power to be able to advocate for my community on a larger scale -Shauna What does it mean to be a Girl of Color (GoC) activist in light of today’s socio-historical and political contexts? Shauna speaks to this through the ways…

Radical Reimaginings is a 5-minute creative video highlighting a multi-year, arts-based, youth participatory research project (YPAR) conducted in collaboration with Black middle and high school girls through the Black Girl Futures program and its signature initiative, Girl Talk! The video uses visual storytelling, youth voice-overs, archival media, and community footage to showcase how Black girls define themselves, build community, and…

2019 The World   When Disney announced the casting of Halle Bailey in The Little Mermaid, racist remarks exploded on the internet which continued when the live action flick was released in 2023. The issue raises the question of where Black people are allowed to be, as some find it challenging to conceive of Black people simply existing in the…

In this essay, I draw on the composite narrative I developed through my work with four Sub-Saharan African (SSA) young women (Mendrika, Manyoni, Njo, and Sanyu)[1] on a project focused on co-exploring social issues and Critical Mathematics Education (CME). CME recognizes that mathematics, mathematics learning, and mathematics teaching are all political.[2] One way to counter this has been using mathematics…

Introduction: A Digital Awakening “Instagram isn’t square anymore” That’s what I told a friend recently as we scrolled through my feed, filled now with rectangles, reels, and curated carousels. But when I began this journey in 2015, it was all squares. Neat. Contained. Like the world I had known up until then. It was a rigid, orderly structure that mirrored…

This multimodal project explores how young Iranian women social media influencers in the 21st century circumvent authoritarian surveillance, forced migration, and digital censorship to continue practicing their feminist activism transnationally during the period from 2018 to 2025. This work features an interactive map that chronicles the stories of women such as Aida Pooryanasab (Toronto), Faravaz Farvardin (Berlin), and Ramina Torabi…

Before beginning this interactive essay, I invite you to listen to the following song. You may not understand the language, and that unfamiliarity may feel unsettling. I encourage you to stay with that discomfort—listen closely nonetheless. In July 2019, two journalism students in their early twenties, Pak Chi-hyŏn and Wŏn Ŭn-ji, discovered that the messaging app Telegram was being used…

Learning from several Ethnic Studies-based courses throughout my education has taught me many things surrounding colonization and the lasting effects of settler colonialism. This helped me understand the causes and roots of oppressive structures we continue to face, our resilience, if it is resilience at all, and the patterns we still see today. However, my own knowledge and experiences I…

Beginnings and Ends Notes for Beginnings and Ends “The Student is the twenty-ninth card in the major arcana, sometimes known as the lost card. The Student cried the day of graduation. They play one role for the Mother, another for schools, another as the Daughter, another for workforces, another as the Model Minority, another for the state, always in the…

We didn’t start this project intending to write a reflection, let alone develop a methodology. What we started with was a shared resonance—something felt across time, bodies, and conversations. It began with a text, a hunch, and a kind of queer, trans trust.  Omi had been working through their discomfort with the framing of Chapter Five in Dude, You’re a…

We write this work as a feminist collective of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a faculty member at the University of Utah. Based in the School of Dance, we draw upon the interdisciplinary creative practice of screendance as an emerging research methodology to remediate (dance) archives through a feminist lens. As both students and teachers of these classes,…