Girlhood and the Politics of Place

Claudia Mitchell is a James McGill Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University and an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She has written extensively in the area of girlhood studies and is the co-founder and editor-in-chief for the award-winning Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

“Firmly grounded in gender and women’s studies’ core concepts and questions, students and scholars alike will find this an important contribution Girlhood Studies, which each chapter promising various applications perhaps not yet considered.” • Canadian Women’s Studies“Comprised of eighteen erudite, informative, and insightful articles by experts in their field, Girlhood and the Politics of Place is enhanced with the further inclusion of an illuminating Introduction… an Epilogue, numerous figures and a table… and a twenty-one page Index. Presenting a body of seminal and original scholarship, [this volume] is an extraordinary study and highly recommended for both college and university library collections.” • Midwest Book Review“Much of the literature in the field can fall into romanticizing girls; essentialist notions of girls based on age-as-fact, race, geography, or socioeconomics; or theoretical constructs that mirror popular cultural conceptions rather than challenging them. This text avoids these traps. The chapters take up a significant social and political consideration in the lives and subjectivities of girls and the construction of ideas of girls.” • Susan Talburt, Georgia State University“A fascinating collection of truly creative essays that convincingly demonstrates how integral and energizing ‘place-making’ is to girls’ everyday lives, identities, activism, and scholarship. By inspiring new avenues of scholarly investigation, [this book] can potentially reshape the field of Girls Studies.” • Miriam Forman-Brunell, University of Missouri, Kansas City

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Significance of Place in Girlhood StudiesCarrie Rentschler and Claudia MitchellSECTION I: GIRLS IN LATITUTDE AND LONGITUDEChapter 1. Under the Shadow of Empire: Indigenous Girls' Presencing as Decolonizing ForceSandrina de FinneyChapter 2. Voices in Longitude and Latitude: Girlhood at the Intersection of Art and EthnographyMarnina GonickChapter 3. Nowhere to Go, Nothing to Do: Place, Desire, and Country GirlhoodCatherine DriscollChapter 4. Landscapes of Academic Success: Smart Girls and School CultureRebecca Raby and Shauna PomerantzSECTION II: SITUATED KNOWLEDGE, SELF-REFLEXIVE PRACTICEChapter 5. Charting Girlhood StudiesClaudia MitchellChapter 6. Teen Feminist Killjoys? Mapping Girls’ Affective Encounters with Femininity, Sexuality, and Feminism at SchoolJessica Ringrose and Emma RenoldChapter 7. Placing the Girlhood Scholar into the Politics of Change: A Reflexive AccountCaroline CaronChapter 8. Returns and Departures Through Girlhood: Memory-work as an Approach to the Politics of Place in Mother-Daughter NarrativesTeresa Strong-WilsonChapter 9. Girls Action Network: Reflecting on Systems Change through the Politics of PlaceTatiana Fraser, Nisha Sajnani, Alyssa Louw, and Stephanie AustinSECTION III: GIRLS AND MEDIA SPACESChapter 10. “What This Picture of a Girl Means to Me”: The Place of Girlhood Images in the Art History University ClassroomLoren LernerChapter 11. Modding as Making: Religious Flap Books Created by Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American GirlsJacqueline Reid-WalshChapter 12. Where are the Irish Girls? Girlhood, Irishness, and L.T. MeadeSusan CahillChapter 13. “God is a DJ”: Girls, Music, Performance, and Negotiating SpaceGeraldine BloustienChapter 14. Creating and Regulating Identity in Online Spaces: Girlhood, Social Networking, and AvatarsConnie MorrisonSECTION IV: STUDYING THE SPACES OF GIRLS’ ACTIVISMChapter 15. Making Activism Accessible: Exploring Girls’ Blogs as Sites of Contemporary Feminist ActivismJessalynn KellerChapter 16. “Ain’t no Justice… It’s Just Us”: Girls Organizing Against Sexual and Carceral ViolenceLena PalaciosChapter 17. From the Playing Field to the Policy Table: Stakeholders’ Responses to Rwandan Schoolgirls’ Photographs on Physical Activity and Sport in Secondary SchoolsLysanne RivardChapter 18. Girls, Condoms, Tradition, and Abstinence: Making Sense of HIV Prevention Discourses in Rural South AfricaKatie MacEnteeEpilogueNotes on ContributorsBibliographyIndex