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Today is the United Nations’ International Day of the Girl Child, and this year’s theme is ‘Girls’ vision for the future’.
Click to expand text: The UN explains more on this year’s International Day of the Girl Child
Today’s generation of girls is disproportionately affected by global crises of climate, conflict, poverty and pushback on hard won gains for human rights and gender equality. Too many girls are still denied their rights, restricting their choices and limiting their futures.
Yet, recent analysis shows that girls are not only courageous in the face of crisis, but hopeful for the future. Every day, they are taking action to realize a vision of a world in which all girls are protected, respected and empowered. But girls cannot realize this vision alone. They need allies who listen to and respond to their needs.
With the right support, resources and opportunities, the potential of the world’s more than 1.1 billion girls is limitless. And when girls lead, the impact is immediate and wide reaching: families, communities and economies are all stronger, our future brighter. It is time to listen to girls, to invest in proven solutions that will accelerate progress towards a future in which every girl can fulfil her potential.
Read Five game-changing solutions with and for adolescent girls, the background of International Day of the Girl Child, Vanessa Nakate on how the climate crisis impacts girls, and more from the UN page here.
In the spirit of this day, we have compiled a collection of some of our titles looking at girlhood below, with free to read introductions and some open access titles.
For more content, you can browse though our books by subject ‘Gender Studies and Sexuality’ here, or take a look at our book series ‘Transnational Girlhoods’ here.
To be published January 2025
Activism Networks by, for, and with Girls and Young Women
Edited by Catherine Vanner
The repression of the rights of girls and women is continuously threatened in a wide range of global cultural contexts. From the rise in laws restricting reproductive freedom to the growth in essentialist ideas about gender and the backlash to the #MeToo movement, the challenges facing girls and young women are as diverse as the activism networks established to address them. Girls Take Action shines light on the myriad ways girls and young women are exercising agency in the face of injustice, considering especially the role of community and collaboration in fostering activism networks and ultimately a more transnational understanding of girlhood.
Volume 8, Transnational Girlhoods
To be published November 2024
Schooling, Aspirations and Imagining the Future Among Female Students in Sri Lanka
Laura Shamali Batatota
For female Sinhalese students attending a national school in the Central Province of Sri Lanka, the school serves as a significant base for cultural production, particularly in reproducing ethno-religious hegemony under the guise of ‘good’ Buddhist girls. It illustrates that tuition space acts as an important site for placemaking, where students play out their cosmopolitan aspirations whilst acquiring educational capital. Drawing on theories of social reproduction, the book examines young people’s aspirations of ‘figuring out’ their identity and visions of the future in the backdrop of nation-building processes within the school.
Open Access
Stories of Black Girlhoods Gathered on Educational Terrain
Edited by Esther O. Ohito and Lucía Mock Muñoz de Luna
Locating Black girls’ desires, needs, knowledge bases, and lived experiences in relation to their social identities has become increasingly important in the study of transnational girlhoods. Black Schoolgirls in Space pushes this discourse even further by exploring how Black girls negotiate and navigate borders of blackness, gender, and girlhood in educational spaces. The contributors of this collected volume highlight Black girls as actors and agents of not only girlhood but also the larger, transnational educational worlds in which their girlhoods are contained.
Volume 7, Transnational Girlhoods
Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.
Figurations of Gendered Power
Edited by Heather Switzer, Karishma Desai, and Emily Bent
“This collection is a well-imagined, important, incisive contribution to the fields of girlhood studies, development studies, and gender studies that deftly exposes the contradictions, complications, and limits of the “Girls in Development” paradigm and the ways it shapes the current landscape of development and thus the lives of girls around the world.” • Jessica Taft, University of California Santa Cruz
Volume 6, Transnational Girlhoods
Read freely available introduction.
Open Access
Transnational Perspectives
Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Ann Smith
“The Girl in the Pandemic makes a unique and much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Girlhood Studies in times of crises in different global contexts and particularly including scholarship from the global south and north.” • Relebohile Moletsane, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Volume 5, Transnational Girlhoods
Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.
Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing
Jasmijn Rana
“Jasmijn Rana has written an engaging, well-crafted and long-anticipated ethnography of the intersectionally gendered and racialized experience of Muslim Dutch women, drawn from her own apprenticeship in women-only kickboxing venues in the southern neighbourhoods of The Hague.” • Paul Silverstein, Reed College
Volume 5, New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations
Read freely available introduction.
A Papuan Nature
Marta Rohatynskyj
“It offers a unique contribution to the literature on Papua New Guinea societies. The ethnography was collected at a time when it was possible to engage with people who had witnessed and participated in complex rites which have lapsed or been replaced by recent introductions.” • James Leach, CNRS
Volume 14, ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology
Read freely available introduction.
An American Icon in Puerto Rico
Barbie, Girlhood, and Colonialism at Play
Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez
“The book provides a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of the transnational impact of Barbie as a cultural object, highlighting the importance of critically examining the cultural products that shape our understanding of gender, race, and identity.” • Women’s Studies
Volume 4, Transnational Girlhoods
Read freely available introduction.
Agency, Social Vulnerability and Welfare Measures in Europe and Beyond
Edited by Maria A. Vogel and Linda Arnell
“This collection truly captures what it means to live like a girl in contemporary Europe, and it is sure to be a key resource for scholars working in the area for years to come.” • Fiona Vera-Gray, Durham University
Volume 3, Transnational Girlhoods
Read freely available introduction.
Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls
Transnational Approaches
Edited by Relebohile Moletsane, Lisa Wiebesiek, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, and April Mandrona
“[This] is an outstanding book with highly fascinating chapter contributions theorizing significant issues of co-researchers, and thereby offering a how-to for conducting participatory research in an ethical manner.” • Participatory Research Methods
Volume 2, Transnational Girlhoods
Read freely available introduction.
Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play
Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell
In recent decades, emerging scholarship in the field of girlhood studies has led to a particular interest in dolls as sources of documentary evidence. Deconstructing Dolls pushes the boundaries of doll studies by expanding the definition of dolls, ages of doll players, sites of play, research methods, and application of theory. By utilizing a variety of new approaches, this collected volume seeks to understand the historical and contemporary significance of dolls and girlhood play, particularly as they relate to social meanings in the lives of girls and young women across race, age, time, and culture.
Read freely available introduction.
Edited by Ann Smith
“Ann Smith’s collection provides both inspiration and a challenge to readers, writers, and researchers of girls and girls themselves to transverse physical and conceptual borders critically to write their own transnational girl into lived and textual existence.” • Girlhood Studies
Volume 1, Transnational Girlhoods
Read freely available introduction.
For more content, you can browse though our books by subject ‘Gender Studies and Sexuality’ here, or take a look at our books series ‘Transnational Girlhoods’ here.
Berghahn Journals
Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers.
Aspasia
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History
Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective.
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