Tag: girls

An Interview with Nafisa Shah, Author of Honour and Violence

The following is an interview with Nafisa Shah about hew new book Honour and Violence: Gender, Power and Law in Southern Pakistan.

1) When did you begin working on Honour and Violence? Can you briefly tell us about your journey as a journalist, scholar, and politician following honor killings in Pakistan?

Honour and Violence is a process, a part of the journey, and not a product or a culmination. It is a coming together of different perspectives in the different roles through which I studied the phenomenon of karo kari, a practice that allows men to take lives of women in his family if accused and seen to be engaging in relationship outside or before marriage by invoking honour violation.

In 1992, as a young and fiery journalist, I travelled to Kashmore, and wrote the first story on honour based customs and practices in Upper Sindh for Newsline, a monthly news and features magazine headed by a woman editor, the late Razia Bhatti.

Then a few years later, as a Reuters fellow at Green College, Oxford I followed it up with a longer piece. My supervisor there, late Helen Callaway, was the first scholar to suggest I needed to convert these shorter journalistic pieces to something more longterm and showed me the academic route. And that’s where I built on whatever I saw and used the anthropological lens, which would allow me to communicate the problem to the wider world. Continue reading “An Interview with Nafisa Shah, Author of Honour and Violence” →

Researching Girls of Color

The following is a guest blog post written by Sharon Lamb, co-author of the article Pride and Sexiness: Girls of Color Discuss Race, Body Image, and Sexualization, which appeared in Volume 8, Number 2 of the journal Girlhood Studies.

 

 

Way back when, my/our research group was interested in the issue of sexualization of girls and how girls conceived of it. We wanted to dive into the dilemma and critique of the APA Sexualization of Girls Task Force Report that suggested the co-authors, myself included, represented girls as dupes of the media, rather than shapers of it who make their own meaning from it. Typically, I have found, White middle class feminist students have been interested in the idea of sexualization although that may have been a result of my being a White middle class feminist (in their eyes, that is, — I wasn’t always middle class!). But that year, in the research group, a woman of color joined us and she was also doing a Practicum at a charter school (with 7th-12th grade students) that was quite diverse, more diverse that we at the time realized. She offered to make the connection for us and so we set about thinking through the questions we wanted to ask girls themselves about what is sexy and what is sexualization, and how race and ethnicity might intersect with their ideas.

Continue reading “Researching Girls of Color” →

Mentoring: Doing and Theorising

Girlhood StudiesThe below is a special guest post written by Ann Smith, the Managing Editor of Girlhood Studies – An Interdisciplinary Journal.

 

While we work with many leading scholars and well-established authors, we also encourage new and inexperienced writers to contribute to Girlhood Studies so, as the managing editor, I see my task as necessarily including a great deal of mentoring. But, how does one talk about mentorship without sounding patronising? Being a mentor in this context is not difficult, if very time-consuming; I have never yet encountered any opposition from an inexperienced contributor to my guidance and suggestions and I often preface encouraging comments about improvements and progress in the development of a ms that is gradually becoming suitable for publication with a statement like: “I don’t mean to sound patronising but I do want to tell you how much better this version is” or something similar. Without exception so far, these authors voice gratitude and are willing to do whatever it takes. But being a mentor and talking about this process are two very different things.

When I say that I have mentored authors whose command of English indicates that this is their second (if not third) language I am already sounding like a colonial authority! There are many Englishes spoken around the world but I have to insist on a level of what might be called white Western English. When I describe an author’s command of academic language as poor or lacking I am insisting that she or he write in a way that is acceptable to a very tiny minority of readers. I find that hard to justify here although I know that what I am doing is the right thing to do in this particular context of editing an academic journal.

It is much easier to use an unoffending agentless passive voice construction to suggest to an author that a thesis put forward, say, in her abstract is being contradicted later in the article than it is to say here—in the brutally declarative active voice—that some authors appear to lack logic and seem to be unable to argue conclusively, true as this might be. And, in the work of new and inexperienced authors, it is easier to correct the misplaced modifiers (of which there have been very many over the years) and fix the incorrect punctuation (that seems to me to be endemic) than it is to say here that some writers have a poor grasp of basic English grammar.

But then, luckily, I am not often called upon to articulate why this mentoring is necessary; I just do it and the best part of it falls outside of any theorising—the recognition that Girlhood Studies has functioned as a launching pad for authors who are on their way to becoming the next generation of leading scholars, and that I have played a role in this process.

by Ann Smith, Managing Editor of Girlhood Studies

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