Project Description
Mapping Black Girl Geographies and Belonging in Canada (2022-2024) is the initial phase of the first Canada-wide academic study of Black girlhoods and national belonging across multiple provinces. The project recruited Black girls (ages 13-19) from the Metro Vancouver and Greater Toronto areas, who created cut-and-paste collages to illustrate both how intersecting geographical, historical, and social impacts, and the marginalization of blackness in the national cultural imaginary, shape their understanding of what it means to be Canadian. Our goal was to identify how the provinces’ different patterns of Black migration, combined with personal family histories and other social factors, influenced how the girls made sense of their world, expressed their identities as Black, Black Canadian, or another hyphenated designation, and created spaces of belonging within majority-white contexts. In doing so, Mapping Black Girl Geographies and Belonging in Canada prompts a necessary conversation about the criticality of including Black histories and geographies in studies about Canadian lives and experiences.
This first phase was co-led by media artist-scholar Desirée de Jesús (York), historian of Black children and girls in North America Crystal Webster (UBC), and Kisha McPherson (TMU), an educator who employs community-based approaches to study media and Black youth. Their work was supported by research assistants Chanelle Perrier-Telemaque (York) and Nala Haileselassie (TMU).
What is Black girlhood?
Black girls, in general, reflect a wide, diverse group of people of African descent who are female-identifying and between the ages of 2 and 19.
For the purposes of this study, references to Black girls refer to culturally diverse groups of girls living in Canada between the ages of 13 and 19 years old who participated in the project and identify as Black, racially and culturally.
Creative Outputs
In 2025, the teen girl co-researchers' cut-and-paste collages were showcased in two iterations of the Vibrant Visions: The Art of Black Girlhood in Canada exhibition. The Greater Toronto iteration was co-curated by Desirée de Jesús, Nala Haileselassie, and Kisha McPherson, and held at the TIFF Lightbox. The Metro Vancouver iteration was curated by Desirée de Jesús and held at The Black Arts Centre.
Professors Kisha McPherson and Desirée de Jesús produced the Love Letters to Black Girlhood video series, which assembled letters from well-known figures and women making contributions outside the spotlight to their younger selves. The first episode pairs the Toronto exhibition soundscape and a love letter written by Camille Dundas, the co-founder of ByBlacks and one of the top 100 Accomplished Black Women in Canada, to her younger self.
Creative outputs from all phases of the project will form an artistic counter-archive that interrogates dominant Canadian girlhood imaginaries, celebrates Black girls’ counter-hegemonic modes of cultural production, and fosters cross-Canadian solidarities. This counter-archive will disseminate the Black girl co-researchers’ oral histories, and its co-creation will facilitate their shared experiences of Canadian cultural belonging.
Mapping Black Girl Geographies and Belonging in Canada was supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Meet the Researchers
Desirée de Jesús is a video essayist and moving images curator whose digital projects concentrate on girls, women, and folks of colour. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Her research uses experimental animation to reimagine Black girls’ critical resistance strategies and participatory filmmaking to explore racialized girls’ experiences of COVID-19 inequalities. She is the host of the GAMERella podcast, co-developer of the satellite guide, and a former GAMERella game jam co-organizer.
Dr. Kisha McPherson is an educator and scholar with over 15 years of research and teaching experience in critical race, cultural studies, social justice and media education. Her research and scholarship are focused on the impact of media, education policies, and contemporary representations of Blackness, on the identity and development of Black youth. Dr. McPherson is interested in utilizing Black feminist approaches to research, community engagement, and education, to develop and contribute to anti-oppressive pedagogies and practices, which aim to support Black youth in both formal academic, and community spaces. Dr. McPherson is an assistant professor in the department of Professional Communications at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU).
Crystal Lynn Webster is an award-winning historian, educator, and speaker. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North was published in 2021. She is currently writing her second book, Condemned: How America’s First Courts and Prisons Terrorized Black Children. Her public scholarship and presentations focus on the significance of history on Black childhood and contemporary issues including education, incarceration, political activism, and child/family development. Additionally, her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, and the New York Times.