Publications

Research Interests

Dr. Carla received her doctoral training at the University of Michigan (U-M). Her research interests include women’s and adolescent girls’ health, sexuality, and relationships; girlhood in America; hip hop and youth culture; youth violence prevention; and digital studies. Her work explores intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and age with mass media, youth culture and social media.

Dr. Carla has examined these topics through a number of scholarly and community-based sexuality education activities, including her pioneering dissertation research study, which investigated sexuality, hip hop, and self-definition in social networking profiles (“home pages”) constructed by 216 Black adolescent girls residing in Southern states in the United States with the highest rates of HIV/AIDS. She conducted her dissertation study in consultation with an expert panel of adolescent girls residing in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Her research highlighted the significance of social media and hip hop culture in shaping the sexual development of black adolescent girls coming of age in the HIV/AIDS era and was one of the first empirical studies to uncover the nuances of cyberbullying, online harassment, and sexualization among adolescent girls. As the first published study of black adolescent girls’ social networking profiles, this research won honorable mention in the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards competition in recognition of exceptional and unusually interesting scholarly work produced by doctoral students (selected from 660 eligible dissertations published at the University of Michigan in 2004).

Fellowships and Grants

Dr. Carla completed a two-year post-doctoral research fellowship appointment at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of HIV Prevention, where she investigated HIV prevention in communities of color and further explored the ways in which adolescent girls use media and hip hop culture to negotiate their sexuality, construct identity, and navigate adolescence. Her research has been funded by a number of institutions, fellowships, and grants, including:

• National Institutes of Health/(U-M) Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health Doctoral Training Fellowship
• Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Public Health Fellowship
• W.K. Kellogg Foundation Health Policy Research Fellowship Program
• Johnson & Johnson Dissertation Grants Program in Women’s Health
• U-M Collaboratory for Advanced Research and Academic Technologies
• U-M Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Selected Publications

Stokes, C.E. (2013). Representin’ in cyberspace: Sexual scripts, self-definition, and hip hop culture in black American adolescent girls’ home pages. In Stombler, M., Simonds, W., Baunach, D.M., Burgess, E.O. (Eds.). Sex matters: The Sexuality and society reader, 4th Edition. (pp. 116-127). W.W. Norton & Company. https://books.google.com/books/about/Sex_Matters

Stokes, C.E. (2010). “Get on my level!”: How black American adolescent girls construct identity and negotiate sexuality on the Internet. In Sharon R. Mazzarella (Ed.). Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting girls, the Internet, and the negotiation of identity. (pp. 45-67) Peter Lang Publishers. https://books.google.com/books?id=lVHAO2ZtFvAC

Stokes, C.E. (2007, March-April). Representin’ in cyberspace: Sexual scripts, self-definition, and hip hop culture in black American adolescent girls’ home pages. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 9(2): 169-184. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17364724/

Stokes, C.E. (2004) Representin’ In Cyberspace: Sexuality, Hip Hop, and Self-Definition In Home Pages Constructed By Black Adolescent Girls In The HIV/AIDS Era. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/124572

Stokes C.E. & Gant L.M. (2002). Turning the tables on the HIV/AIDS epidemic: Hip hop as a tool for reaching African-American adolescent girls. African American Research Perspectives, 8(2), 70-81. https://prba.isr.umich.edu/publications/african-american-research-perspectives/