Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-2317-9731

Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

College of Applied Human Sciences

Department

Education

Committee Chair

Sharon Hayes

Committee Co-Chair

Audra Slocum

Committee Member

Erin McHenry-Sorber

Committee Member

Adrienne Washington

Abstract

This study examines the experiences and stories of two Black girls in predominantly White Appalachian communities, focusing on the language and literacy practices they employ to navigate and make sense of their Black feminine identities. It focuses on how literacy and language skills acquired from spending quality time with their mothers, engaging in various spaces with friends, and engaging in interest-driven traditional media and/or social media helped them to analyze their communities’ and the larger landscapes’ discourses around race and gender to create and modify their desired identities. This qualitative study employs narrative case study to center the lived experiences of two adolescent girls while examining the roles of place, gender, and race in shaping their identities. This study highlights how the messages received from relationships and intentional media consumption helped the girls to understand visible and invisible discourses around Blackness and Black girls circulating in their largely White communities and America at large. By enacting agency and well-curated intentional literacy and language strategies, they were able to maintain a positive sense of self by creating and enacting their own versions of Black girl identities in various spaces while deciphering and navigating the hidden messages in racially coded, microaggressive, biased, and/or racist terminology, experiences, and/or practices while also being able to decipher and reject unwanted identities placed on them by others. This study contributes to research on the identity-making processes of Black girls, centered around intentional language and literacy practices, by examining the nuances of their intersectional identities in Appalachian spaces and in other areas deemed exclusively White in the American imagination

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