Understanding whether engaging in social justice inquiry helps urban
adolescent girls resist society's ideological construction of them as
explicated in the research literature and understanding the
implications, both individually and more globally, of such research on
five Black adolescent girls as they conducted an ethnographic study of
their neighbourhoods as part of their sophomore year of high school is
the focus of this study. Findings indicated that the girls'
self-perceptions disagreed with how they thought society perceived them.
The girls pointed indirectly to a lack of investment on the part of
local and regional governments in the urban areas as causes of the lack
of sense of safety they and their families felt and the desire they felt
to leave to go to college and pursue their ambitions. The girls also
displayed evidence of appropriating funds of knowledge.