Assistant Professor Ashley Smith-Purviance, who joined the faculty in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State in August of 2022, specializes in Black Girlhood Studies, a field of social science that focuses on the unique experiences of Black girls in the U.S. and across the world.

“The goal of Black Girlhood Studies is to create a space for Black girls to be seen, heard and deeply understood. We want to position them as theorizers of their own lives,” Smith-Purviance said. “As a former Black girl, now a Black woman, I don’t know what it means to be a Black girl today. So, it is important for me to work alongside Black girls to try and understand and think alongside them.”

Smith-Purviance grew up and completed her undergraduate studies in Chicago. She said her own experiences as a Black girl helped form her initial vision for her own approach to Black Girlhood Studies. 

“For a long time, I kind of blamed myself for some of my experiences in the world based on my skin color and started to dislike who I was as a person, just because I was treated differently,” she said. “Once I got into graduate school, I started to read other Black women scholars who brought into context how some of these experiences I had had been structurally created.

“It really hit home for me,” she continued. “I cried when I first read some of that literature because I finally felt liberated in a sense. Someone was providing the language that was similar to my own experience.”

Smith-Purviance, who also holds an appointment in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, just finished her first full semester of teaching at Ohio State. Her first class, Black Women: From Slavery to Freedom, focused mostly on adult Black women. However, Smith-Purviance wanted to acknowledge the experience of young Black women in that space as well. 

“A lot of what happened during enslavement and all the way up to present day that impacts Black women also impacts young Black girls as well,” she said. “We know Martin Luther King and we know Malcolm X, but we don’t often know the names of Black women and girls who have been at the center of the work that has happened to create change. We want to acknowledge and study young Black women and their voices and experiences.”

Smith-Purviance’s scholarship is grounded in Black Girlhood Studies. Her first book, tentatively titled, (Un)Schooling Black Girls: Navigating Suburbia, Anti-Black-Girl Violence & Mechanisms of School Survival, is currently under review. The book, which stems from her dissertation research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looks at Black girls’ experience in predominantly white middle schools based in the Midwest. 

“I found that these girls faced a lot of isolation and punishment in addition to racism and gender-based violence as well,” Smith-Purviance said. “My research looked at their everyday experiences at school and how that collectively builds and creates harm.”

Her research led to the formation of an afterschool group called “Black Girl Magic,” that she co-created with Black women, where they worked with middle school Black girls and could focus on their identity and discuss what it felt like to be a young Black girl. They also engaged the girls in activities like artmaking, journaling, yoga, double dutch, roller skating and circle conversations as a way to foster their joy.  

“Our goal in Black Girl Magic was to foster their identity development, self-love and pride and allow them to define what it means to be a Black girl.”

She also started “The Rolling Archives,” a website and digital archive which aims to “amplify the voices of Black women & girls by uncovering the spaces & experiences that shape them, spotlighting the communities they co-create for their collective joy and living and immortalizing their stories for the preservation of Black girls’ presence and existence(s) within our material and imaginative worlds.” She is excited about how this work will bridge the connection between community-engaged work and the academic fields of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American and African Studies. 

As she continues her research, Smith-Purviance is even further motivated by Ohio State’s investment in the Department of African American and African Studies.

“We have a new department chair, a lot of new faculty coming in and we are reimagining what African American and African Studies can be and what it can look like,” Smith-Purviance said. “It has been really exciting because it forces us to make sure our curriculum and our research are fitting in with the shifts that are happening within AAAS as a field.”