Lifting up our girls: An interpretive study of girls' negotiation of organizational empowerment messages

The following dissertation is an ethnographically informed exploration of teen girls engaging within an educational/intervention, all-girl urban teen center that seeks to empower girls. Paying particular attention to the girls' voices in relation to the curriculum messages and classroom activities, this study interrogated the space where messages of desired change (intervention/prevention/education) collided with girls' daily and active communicative practices. Specifically, analysis sought to explore alternative ways of understanding the "success" of educational/intervention attempts by asking: How do organizational messages and/or practices enable and/or constrain a complicated discussion of the girls' lives and future possibilities? Is there evidence that program messages merge with the girls' personal lives outside of this organizational space? How do the girls understand their personal experiences in relation to these messages? Are there instances where the girls' practices personify the ideals of confidence, leadership and/or gender freedom as desired by the program? Does this process challenge dominant and limiting discourses surrounding race, class, and gender, or does it reproduce them?;Shining the research lens on the girls revealed both the limitations as well as the possibilities enabled by organizational messages. Specifically, findings explored the ways in which the curriculum structure suppressed the girls' daily, diverse, raced and classed experiences by highlighting how the girls responded, adapted, and/or negotiated their own ideas, values, and experiences with the values and expectations of the organization. The curriculum within the classroom served as a dominant discourse, often embedded in white, middle-class assumptions. This dominant script set the tone for the naturalized and normalized expectations that emerged. However, findings additionally illustrated the power of loosely structured and participant centered messages to create an empowering and engaging experience for the girls. Overall, an all-girl teen center, designed to allow girls to interact with each other and with female instructors, provided girls with a safe space to be active agents in creating new scripts for understanding themselves. As such, analysis revealed both the limitations of the intervention/educational attempts as well as highlighting the active practices that often challenged traditional discourses surrounding what it means to be an appropriate "urban girl."...