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Purpose – This article critically (re)examines the Girl Effect narrative in order to problematize the ways that this discursive paradigm shapes the forms and possibilities for girls’ political subjectivity and agency.Approach – Based on a close, textual reading of the first Girl Effect video, the study adopts the tools of deconstruction to reveal the discursive (im)possibilities for differently situated girls. It draws from contemporary girls’ studies scholarship and postcolonial feminist theory to identify the production of oppositional girlhoods and neoliberal girl power, while further considering how these disciplinary effects inform girls’ political practices.Findings – The author suggests that the Girl Effect paradigm offers limited understandings of girls’ political subjectivity: prompting Western girls to become agents of missionary girl power and positioning Third World girls as perpetual victims waiting for rescue.Originality/value – By exploring the effects of the Girl Effect logic, this article troubles the political ideologies framing the “invest in girls” message and contributes original research to the growing field of girls’ studies.

Loretta E. Bass is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Connecticut and completed a two-year appointment within the Fertility and Family Branch of the Population Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. Dr. Bass focuses her research on children and stratification issues, and has published her research in Population Research and Policy Review, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Focus, Political Behavior, Anthropology of Work Review, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Journal of Reproductive Medicine, Journal of Sociology and Social Work, International Journal of Sexual Health, and Current Sociology. Prior to becoming the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth Series Editor, she served as co-editor for two years and as a guest-editor for a special international volume in 2005. She has also published a book, Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004), which offers a window on the lives of child workers in 43 African countries. She currently serves as Past-Chair of the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Children and Youth Section and as the President of Research Committee 53 on the Sociology of Childhood within the International Sociological Association (ISA).

Since we began work on this volume in 2011, images of youth who are politically and civically engaged have populated news stories. Youth activists played key roles in the social movements that sparked and spread through Africa and the Middle East in the “Arab Spring” of 2011 and 2012. In Norway, politically engaged youth attending a summer camp run by the ruling Labour Party became the victims of a mass shooting in July of 2011. Students in Chile, Mexico City, and Quebec took to the streets in order to challenge the rising costs of education and to organize for improvements to their colleges and universities. Undocumented youth in the United States publicly shared their stories and lobbied for passage of the DREAM Act. And local newspapers throughout the United States continued to celebrate youth who were honored for their volunteer service with awards and scholarships.

Play and playful literacies shape essential spaces for belonging, connection, transformation and joy: from embodied immersions into fantasy worlds, to the creation of interest-led groups overflowing with varied knowledges and identities, and the disruption of societal hierarchies through roleplayed restorying. Yet, theorizations delineating playful possibilities – while plentiful and varied – are often rigidly constructed in relation to neoliberally/biopolitically motivated notions of value, use and productivity. Imbued with forms of modern power, play’s full flourishing has been regulated and quelled, particularly within the realm of education. This study, a literature review, seeks to defy this fatuous notion of a frivolous play.

Drawing from research within the fields of literacy and educational studies, the author centers playful methods commonly trivialized in contemporary discourse, including in global out-of-school spaces (e.g. gaming clubs, improvisational theater groups), with popular culture texts (e.g. picture books, digital fanfiction) and for older youth and adults.

This exploration of play’s potential across lifespans, formal/informal learning ecologies and worldwide contexts foregrounds its intrinsic nature and essential entwining with socio-culturally/materially mediated forms of knowledge and communication.

With a unique focus on the playful literacies emerging across ages, spaces and places, this review advocates a turn toward the imaginative, messy, uncontrollable worlds of play in future research and practice.

This chapter is an examination of the contribution of female musicianship to the Perth metal scene, particularly in relation to the positioning of women in frontier mythology and the ways in which we might read the gothic sublime in terms of women’s experiences. While it has been recognised that Australian metal music, in general, is tied to the colonial frontier narrative, Perth’s isolation produces a particular kind of frontier narrative which can be read in relation to the gothic sublime. In this chapter, the author examines three Perth metal bands which comprise female members: Claim the Throne (featuring Jess Millea on keys and vocals), Sanzu (featuring Fatima Curley on bass) and Deadspace (featuring Shelby Jansen on bass and vocals). The author will argue that there is a motif running through Perth bands that comprise female musicians that is tied to their positioning in the Western frontier narrative and its production in relation to the gothic sublime. To do so presents one kind of way to conceptualise a metal scene on the ‘Western Front’. The author emphasises that this is not a totalising conceptualisation, rather, it is one way to suggest how context might shape women’s experiences and, perhaps more importantly for this argument, the way in which women women’s experiences and historicity in relation to the legacy of ‘frontierswomen’ inflect metal music in this scene.

This chapter uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Muller is typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours. However, this chapter argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place – the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon – the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. This chapter investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely the entangled histories of white laundresses’ labor and labor activism in Portland, as well as the labor of their competitors – Chinese laundrymen. In so doing, this chapter offers an intersectional reading of Muller that incorporates regulations on Chinese laundries and places the decision in conversation with a long line of anti-Chinese laundry legislation on the West Coast, including that at issue in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role private action has played in overcoming the collective action problem posed by Hurricane Katrina.

The paper analyses the post‐Hurricane Katrina situation with regard to commercial and civil society.

The paper argues that private recovery efforts within commercial and civil society challenge this assumption. Mutual assistance, commercial cooperation, and the redevelopment of key community resources help to overcome collective action problems by reducing the high costs of an early return and by signaling the potential for widespread recovery to individual actors. Though most redevelopment plans assume that a large‐scale government response is the only way to overcome the collective action problem.

Even in the absence of a government‐led reconstruction effort, the strategies described in the paper offer Gulf Coast residents tools for solving the collective action problem presented in the wake of catastrophic devastation.