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The purpose of this chapter is to explore the utility of a postcolonial feminist girlhood studies approach to investigate, and better understand, how corporate-funded sport, gender and development (SGD) programs that adhere to the “Girl Effect” mantra take up: (1) the alleged benefits of SGD programming; (2) its (embodied) neoliberal tendencies; and (3) issues around gender and cultural difference in North-South aid relations.

This study uses qualitative methods, including 35 semi-structured interviews with staff members and young women, in order to investigate how a SGD program in Eastern Uganda that is funded by a Sport Transnational Corporation (STNC) and an International NGO used martial arts to build girls’ self-defense skills and address gender-based, sexual, and domestic violence.

Three major findings are revealed, including: (1) the martial arts program improved young women’s confidence levels, physical fitness, leadership capabilities, and social networks; (2) Western donors tended to use and frame sport (i.e., martial arts) as paramount for educating and training Ugandan young women to be (neoliberal) global “girl” citizens; and (3) issues of representation, racialized subjectivity, and cultural difference in SGD adversely influenced aid relations.

Evidence from this chapter suggests that it is crucial to question how global neoliberal development, as promoted via SGD practices, is not only racialized and classed, but also distinctly gendered. Infusing girlhood studies with a postcolonial feminist perspective enables a deconstruction, and attendance to, the ways in which colonial legacies, neoliberal processes, and the political resistance of development practices are taken up, and impelled by, SGD programs.

With heightened national attention placed on race and gender identity, the ability and preparedness of students to engage in critical conversations on such topics and with diverse groups is of much concern to educators. High school student-athletes are frequently thrust into the spotlight on topics related to race and racial identity, due to their hypervisibility and role as representatives of their schools. This chapter uses current events involving Black girl, high school, student-athletes to demonstrate how racialized and gendered experiences may shape how they understand themselves as well as their school and non-school environments. Further, this chapter includes a study that highlights the narratives of two Black female college athletes who, when prompted to discuss racialized and gendered experiences, shared stories that highlighted their primary and secondary educational experiences. These narratives identify school diversity and fitting in, and the coach as influencer as salient themes from the study. This illuminates the influence of early racialized encounters and the salience of those occurrences in shaping the way Black girls think about their own racial and gender identity development. In closing, this chapter calls on educators to prepare themselves to facilitate conversations about race through the use of equity audits, effective programming for Black girls, and a call for education advocates for Black girls in preK-12 environments.

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.

This paper aims to contribute to a growing body of work (re)imagining the future for Black girls by calling Western notions of time into question. At its core, this paper argues that all Black girls are imaginative beings and that it is essential that Black girlhood imagination as a mode of future-making praxis be considered an integral component in the pursuit of Black liberation. To do such the author engages Black feminist futurity Campt (2017) and Black Quantum Futurity Phillips (2015) to illuminate ways a reconceptualization of time provides us with an analytical tool to amplify Black girls’ liberatory fantasies.

A literature review was conducted to synthesize Black girls’ freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002) across time in an effort to demonstrate that Black girls, despite their conditions, are experts in self-defining their dreams of the future. It also highlights methods that researchers use to elucidate the freedom dreams of Black girls years past.

This paper underscores the urgency in applying future-oriented research practices in the attempt to create a new world for Black girls. It also demonstrates that Black girls have always been and always be, imaginative beings that engaged in future-making dreaming.

The author offers a conceptual framework for researchers committed to witnessing Black girl imaginations and in an effort to work in concert with Black girls to get them freer, faster.

This paper makes the argument that studying the imaginations and freedom dreams of Black girls requires the employment of future-oriented theories that have a racial, gender and age-based analysis.

The purpose of this study is to explore the means, rationale, challenges and opportunities of shifting focus from anti-racist to pro-Black educational practice. The authors argue that while anti-racism is necessary, it is insufficient in addressing the deeply entrenched anti-Blackness in US society. The instructor and three student members of a graduate course on Black girlhoods reflect on their time together to better understand the process of developing a classroom specifically for Black students.

Through a process of collaborative autoethnography, the authors used their reflections as data to identify the practices that served to establish their space as pro-Black and consider how these practices may apply to other contexts.

The data presented indicate that co-construction, intentionality and care and love are integral to developing a pro-Black classroom. The implementation of these practices in the authors’ graduate course allowed the students to feel seen and affirmed, which contrasts with their previous experiences in higher education.

This paper introduces the concept of the pro-Black classroom space as a pedagogical transformation aimed at preserving Black lives. The authors’ insights demonstrate how concrete practices that not only constitute anti-racist practice, but further challenge anti-Black bias, help to dismantle structural and systemic inequities in academia.

Using data from a feminist discourse analysis of comments on Facebook news articles, this research outlines backlash and regulatory practices directed towards youth activists Greta Thunberg, X González and Malala Yousafzai. A conceptual framework of semiotic violence highlights how these comments function to silence, delegitimise, vilify and punish sociopolitically active girls who challenge the status quo. The first mode of semiotic violence works to symbolically annihilate girl activists by silencing or rendering their political contributions invisible. The most obvious manifestation of this is instructing girls to shut up and go away. Additionally, their activism is ignored by refusals to acknowledge it as appropriate through suggestions they focus on gender-normative activities, such as domestic chores, playing with dolls and finding boyfriends. Undermining girls’ agency by describing them as puppets, mouthpieces, script readers, pawns and tools is also common. Here, girls’ contributions are rendered invisible through implications that they are being brainwashed and manipulated. The second mode of semiotic violence reinforces ideologies that girls are not politically competent and punishes them for being outspoken. This includes explicitly discrediting girls’ knowledge and abilities. Regulating their emotionality is also prevalent. This is consistent with Liberal political theory which justified women’s exclusion from public life by associating men with reason and women with emotion. Finally, insults degrade them for transgressing into a space demarcated as an adult and masculine realm. The semiotic violence directed towards these ‘girl power’ figures highlights that many people do not believe girls have the right to assert their sociopolitical opinion.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight how young people engage in social justice work. This study is guided by the following question: how do students engage in the social justice work of storytelling through art?

The title stems from a conversation the researcher had with the four female students about whether they identified themselves as activists. After the students collectively agreed that they did not align with the term “activist”, they continued to grapple with definitions of the word and discussed other terms to describe themselves. The conversation is one of many that emerged from a three-year qualitative research project that focused on youth activism, which included a one-year critical narrative inquiry into a ninth-grade Humanities classroom.

This paper positions the artwork as activism, in that the girls embedded multiple narratives into their art to portray a complex narrative about the realities of sex trafficking in their community.

The paper will conclude with implications that focus on the importance of blurring the boundaries between classrooms and communities, cultivating spaces for young people to develop an activist stance and working alongside youth as they compose political–personal stories about injustice, inequality and inequities in their fights for social change.

This paper offers a unique discussion of artmaking (collective biography) as a form of socially just youth literacy. As such, interstitial literacies become the acts of speaking, reading, writing and being that youth/students create and engage in as they move between classrooms and communities.

Often seen as a vulnerable group, tween girls fashioning themselves after adults have been a topic of significant concern. Public and academic discourse in the West has expressed worry that girls’ adult-like dressing may expose them to a range of physical, psychological and sexual harm. In most discussions on girls’ dressing, Western popular culture is also identified as one of the prevalent ways through which girls learn to how to fashion themselves after adults. It is claimed that Western television programmes, books and magazines encourage young girls to fashion themselves after adults at an earlier age. Recognising the importance of girls’ voices in their experiences of girlhood, this chapter draws exclusively on 12 focus groups, with 29 Singaporean girls aged 8–12. It finds that there are changing mediascapes in tween girls’ lives that have not been acknowledged. No longer predominantly watching television or browsing teen magazines, this chapter highlights how young Singaporean girls are now more likely to spend their time on the popular media platform YouTube. As girls gain mobility through their mobile communication devices, this chapter calls for a closer examination of YouTube in relation to girls’ dressing. Nonetheless, this chapter also acknowledges that while certain popular YouTube videos (re)produce highly narrow ideas of what a female should look or be like, it is not a simple issue of girls learning how to dress from their favourite YouTube stars. YouTubers also represented a lexicon of empowerment for some of the girls in this study.

This scoping review aims to examine peer-reviewed literature related to girls’ (age 0–18) and young women’s (age 19–30) leader identity development.

This study uses a scoping review. A research librarian was consulted at the start of the project. Two sets of search terms (one for each age group) were identified and then used to find publications via our selected databases. The search results were uploaded to Covidence and evaluated using the determined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The final sample of articles for the review was analyzed using exploratory coding methods.

From the analysis, four domains were identified that influence girls’ and young women’s leader identity development: relationships, personal characteristics, meaningful engagement and social identities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to solely explore girls’ and young women’s leader identity development. The factors and domains identified provide useful guidance for future research and practice. The findings reveal considerations about leader identity that can inform the creation of effective leadership development initiatives for girls early in their lifespan. These interventions could provide girls with a strong leadership foundation that could drastically alter their leadership trajectories in adulthood. Previous research has conveyed the advantages of having more women participate in leadership. Thus, this potential not only benefits girls and women but organizations and society at large.