Aimee Meredith Cox. Can Citizenship Care? Black Girls Reimagining Citizenship. In the past several years, questions about young people's citizenship have become the focus of both celebration and debate.
What degree of protection and care can young people demand of the state? How can young people navigate a social and political world that seems determined to limit their participation? In her compelling ethnography, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, Aimee Meredith Cox presents eight years of field research with Give Girls a Chance, a social service organization for homeless girls in Detroit, where she served as the director of the organization's homeless shelter, Fresh Start.
The book's foremost subjects are the girls who participate in the programming offered by Give Girls a Chance and the harsh material conditions of being Black, female, and poor. At the same time, it is an intimate study of a social services organization and a portrait of post-industrial Detroit during an economic downturn. Within this methodological, institutional, and geopolitical context, Cox offers the notion of shapeshifting--the mechanism through which Black girls confront and contest the effects of systemic oppression--as a way of conceptualizing citizenship.
The monograph argues that Black girls redefine and create new conditions for their own flourishing by shifting the boundaries of how citizenship, belonging, and care can be imagined. Cox weaves together lively narratives about life in the shelter with the stories of three generations of women in the pseudonymous Brown family, including shelter residents Janice and Crystal Brown, and their grandmother, Bessie Brown.
The residents of the Fresh Start shelter--mostly Black teenaged girls and young women, some with small children, encounter constant reminders that they are "always already defined as the problematic given" Their lives and bodies are under surveillance from all directions as they navigate structures of domination in their everyday lives: Job Corps training programs that seem determined to limit, rather than expand the girls' career prospects; precarious, low-paying jobs that frustrate the girls' attempts at economic self-sufficiency; and educational opportunities that demand a middle-class capital that the girls do not possess.
