Coming of Age in the Diaspora

In Philadelphia, prom night often begins long before students arrive at the dance. On sidewalks and in recreation centers, in front yards and rented halls, families set the scene for “prom send-offs”—big pre-prom celebrations with loved ones and neighbors where teenagers pose for photos in front of ornate backdrops and balloons, enjoy music, share food, and revel in red carpet moments as they step into the next chapter of their lives.

Sociologist Sadiyah Malcolm-Wallace (Ph.D. ’24) is studying these send-offs as meaningful rites of passage for Black youth in a city shaped by both deep culture and deep economic inequality. “Philadelphia has a reputation for having very extravagant prom celebrations,” she says, noting also that she spent most of her childhood growing up in the city, making it a research site she knows intimately.

In recent years, as mainstream media caught wind of this dominantly African American tradition, prom send-offs drew criticism as promgoers and their families were criticized for what some called irresponsible spending. Malcolm-Wallace has heard the familiar question: How can families in under-resourced neighborhoods afford such a big night? “That’s usually the frame for people who are criticizing these experiences,” she says. But her research asks a different question: From the standpoints of young people in Philadelphia, how can we understand the prom send-off as a site of both meaning-making and resistance?

“I am interested in thinking about the ways in which Philadelphians use the prom send-off to resist these narratives of economic scarcity, against these frames of deservingness and as a way to celebrate youth as they near high school graduation,” she says. 

To Malcolm-Wallace, prom send-offs are not only about style—though style is part of the story. They are also about community memory and public celebration in places where young people are too often discussed only through deficit narratives.

“This is a city contending with violence, addiction, housing insecurity, and more recently school closures amidst fast-paced re-development she says, “but it also has much culture, and in some ways, you never know what young people are overcoming in their celebrations.”

Her research also highlights the way send-offs pull together local economies and social ties. Photographers, DJs, stylists, barbers, dressmakers, and event planners help create the moment. Families gather across generations. “Spending dollars within the community matters,” she says, noting that the infusion of spending into small businesses each spring could be vital to their ability to serve the community year-round.

Malcolm-Wallace also pushes back on a common argument that money would be “better spent” elsewhere. “Assuming that maybe spending that money on books for college means you’re going to overturn poverty and its impacts is, for one, incorrect,” she says. “But also, it’s just unfair to dismiss and criticize people’s celebration because you think you know how they should spend their money better than they do.”

Ultimately, Malcolm-Wallace is interested in the ways that prom send-offs illustrate how structural inequality and cultural creativity can exist side by side. “I see this opportunity as one to celebrate young people, as they move through these milestones,” she says.

Malcolm-Wallace’s focus on the coming of age experiences of youth began with her volunteer work with youth development organizations during her teenage and undergraduate years. “My application essay to graduate school maps closely onto what became my dissertation, so it was really that community work that brought me to sociology,” she says.

Her dissertation research—currently underway as a book project—explores Jamaican girls’ transitions to adulthood in Kingston, Jamaica, where she conducted ethnographic observation, focus groups, and interviews over multiple years. While Malcolm-Wallace spent most of her childhood in Philadelphia, her early years were spent in Jamaica, and she describes her perspective as both personal and as a member of the broader African diaspora.

During her graduate school experience, she conducted research in Jamaica, affiliated with a regional research center at the University of the West Indies, Mona, connecting everyday girlhood experiences to wider regional conversations about colonial legacies and repair.

A central concept in the project is what she calls the “Big Ooman” trope. The English translation for the Jamaican Patois word “ooman” is “woman,” colloquially used to challenge young teenage girls as they engage with ideas and activities ahead of their developmental stage: “Do you think you’re a grown ooman [woman]?”

The phrase “big ooman” can sound simple, but Malcolm-Wallace argues that it has a cultural resonance with adultification bias, where children—particularly Black girls—are mistakenly perceived as more mature, less innocent, and more adult-like than their peers. This can lead to
harsher consequences from authority figures, societal hypersexualization, and other harmful erasures of girlhood.

“When puberty starts to hit and they’re getting older, a lot of older women say that they think that they’re grown,” she says, and on the other hand, this might mean that they are in danger in new and different ways.

The challenges Jamaican girls face are also connected to the global struggles affecting the diaspora. Malcolm-Wallace points to how colonial structures and impacts, including adultification bias, remain “palpable,” from schools to courts to governance. Her work argues that Jamaican girls’ experiences are both uniquely Jamaican and deeply familiar across Black communities shaped by exploitation and inequality.

This summer, Malcolm-Wallace will launch the Yute (Youth, Urban, and Transnational Ethnography) Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is an assistant professor. “We’re thinking about critically studying the interior lives of young people,” she says, “and looking at their life worlds.”

Reflecting on what she hopes one of the outcomes of her lab will be, Malcolm-Wallace is optimistic that the work can be used to help direct resources to youth in need, with a major takeaway from her research in Jamaica fueling this thought. “The girls I worked with knew what the problems were in their communities,” she says. “They just need the people with the resources to listen and to prioritize their needs.”