Fostering Deconstructions: Urban Adolescent Girls as Researchers

Understanding whether engaging in social justice inquiry helps urban adolescent girls resist society’s ideological construction of them as explicated in the research literature and understanding the implications, both individually and more globally, of such research on five Black adolescent girls as they conducted an ethnographic study of their neighbourhoods as part of their sophomore year of high school is the focus of this study. Findings indicated that the girls’ self-perceptions disagreed with how they thought society perceived them. The girls pointed indirectly to a lack of investment on the part of local and regional governments in the urban areas as causes of the lack of sense of safety they and their families felt and the desire they felt to leave to go to college and pursue their ambitions. The girls also displayed evidence of appropriating funds of knowledge.