Places to Be: Black Girls Mapping, Navigating, and Creating Space through Digital Practice

Chapter 1 highlights the function of Black girl autopoetics as a space-making technology. Using ethnographic data from Black girls in Richmond, Virginia, the chapter theorizes Black girls’ geographies through the inextricability of their digital content, physical environments, and worldviews. Drawing from Black girls’ posts on social media, it constructs a theory of the digital as both spatial and material. It argues that Black girls’ digital media productions illustrate the interconnected and multilayered spaces that they must navigate, and their movements through these spaces both shape and are shaped by their production of digital content. In addressing the spatiality of the digital, this chapter also explains how Black girls respond to and attempt to control their environments.