Photovoice at the hooks hub: Black Girls Dissident Definitions of Safe Space at Predominantly White Kentuckian Schools

In this article, we consider Black girls’ experiences as teenagers in Kentuckian school systems through an intertextual analysis alongside photovoice research. We ask questions to understand connections between bell hooks’ educational landscape, and co-researchers’ educational landscapes after 2020. Relying on hooks’ Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, we lay out the various means through which Black teenage girls understand their education through photography to read anti-Black girl systems of power and oppression in schools. Findings suggest that co-researchers’ critiques of their learning environments elicit powerful re-definitions of predominantly white learning institutions throughout our photovoice project. With additional findings, we present specific interventions that educators and administrators should provide to create Black girl safe spaces. The ways in which Black girls identify safe spaces in predominantly white schools allows us to conduct research that underscores patterns of marginalizing Kentucky’s Black girls and the brilliance they harbor in juxtaposition to their oppression. We conclude by calling readers to redefine the meaning and stipulations for identifying PWIs and creating Black girl safe spaces as pathways that educators, researchers, clinicians, and other stakeholders should embrace for Black girls to feel safe, comfortable, and free in Kentucky’s schools.