Critiquing from the Margins: Examining the Power of Black Girls™ Critiques of Class-Based Disparities in Schools

Join us for our fourth session with Jomaira Salas Pujols, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard College, on Thursday, March 28, from 5pm to 6pm in the Levy Conference Room, or on Zoom. Dr. Pujols’s presentation will be followed by an open Q&A session with audience members—both those in person and on Zoom are welcome to ask questions.

Light refreshments will be served.

REGISTER TO ATTEND THE EVENT VIA ZOOM HERE

Social scientists have long attended to how Black and other marginalized groups articulate critiques of class exploitation and socioeconomic disparities. This research sheds light into the mechanisms through which Black individuals come to identify economic oppression and how they leverage these insights to engage in community and political organizing. Too often missing from this narrative, however, are the voices of Black youth, who not only face chronic unemployment but are also impacted by decades of urban and school divestment. In this talk, I turn to the voices and experiences of high school-aged Black girls to examine how they articulate the motivations and impact of educational funding inequities. I argue that Black girls display a keen awareness of the relationship between anti-Blackness and the chronic underfunding of public education, and document how their insights can offer us frameworks for moving from critical consciousness into action.

Jomaira Salas Pujols, PhD is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard College. Her research sits at the intersection of race, place, gender, and education. Her current book project, Black Girls Journeying, examines how Black girls draw on their movement through place to identify and challenge educational injustice—a concept she theorizes as journeying. Her research has been published in the Youth & Society journal and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation. Professor Salas Pujols’s other research interests include the study of Afro-Latina girlhood, Black girls’ perceptions of school dress codes, and the racialized legacies of punishment in school.  

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