In this article we report on the results of a semester-long critical media literacy initiative with underserved fourth- and fifth-grade girls. Building on the work in girls' studies, feminist pedagogies and critical media studies, this project was designed to privilege girls' voices, experiences, and agency by culminating in the girls' own media production of zines—hand-made, hand-distributed booklets based around the author's interests and experiences. By examining before and after focus group interviews conducted with participants and analyzing the content of their zines, we interrogate participants' general—but hardly linear—shift from positions of celebratory, uncritical media exposure, to self-affirming, transgressive media consumption and production. Ultimately, our findings both emphasize the need for feminist critical media literacy education, and articulate its pedagogical challenges.
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Girl Zines at Work
Feminist Media Literacy Education with Underserved Girls
Leigh Moscowitz and Micah Blaise Carpenter
Claudia Mitchell
This first issue of Girlhood Studies in 2015 heralds the beginning of our move from two to three issues a year. This change acknowledges the burgeoning interest in Girlhood Studies as an academic area, and the increase in submissions from contributors. It also acknowledges the global context for work on girlhood. Indeed, as part of this exciting time, we bring to the Girlhood Studies community the second in a series of themed issues focusing on girlhood in different geographic and political contexts. Thus, following “Nordic Girls’ Studies: Current Themes and Theoretical Approaches” (Girlhood Studies 6:1), and in collaboration with the guest editors of that issue, we present this special issue on “Girlhood Studies in Post-Socialist Times.” The mock-up in Figure 1 offers a transliteration of the logo on the cover of Girlhood Studies into Russian; it was created for the first Russian Girlhood Studies conference, “Girlhood Studies: Prospects and Setting an Agenda” held in Moscow on 7 December 2012 at the Gorbachev-Foundation. This conference was a momentous event, attended by Mr. Gorbachev himself, that brought together scholars from various Russian universities and institutions to consider what Girlhood Studies as an interdisciplinary area of feminist scholarship could look like. Many of the presentations at that conference are now articles in this themed issue.
Claudia Mitchell
This Special Issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal highlights a unique moment in history in two ways. First, it offers a collection of articles based on presentations made at the inaugural International Girls Studies Association
A Call to Action
Creativity and Black Girlhood
Crystal Leigh Endsley
to action is urgent. The call situates Black Girls’ studies as actionable space and emphasizes working from a place of love. In order to insist on this ethic of love, Brown also insists that we read her work in a way that “invite[s] a Black
Melanie Kennedy and Natalie Coulter
contemporary social anxieties and debates about vulnerable group members’ uses and navigations of new media (newer at least than the platforms and technologies girls studies scholars such as Harris were writing about over a decade ago) get projected. It seems
More Than Just a Simple Refrain?
The Figure of the Girl in International Cinema
Elspeth Mitchell
Handyside and Kate Taylor-Jones, is a welcome and important contribution at the intersection of girls studies and feminist film theory. As the editors suggest in their introduction, the girl is a figure that enables debate; in this volume we find a worthy
Dayna Prest
Susanne Gannon, is an exciting contribution to conversations in girl studies, memory studies, and feminist methodologies. Drawing on post structuralist theories of Deleuze (1998) and Butler (1990 , 2009 ), the chapters of this book explore the production
Claudia Mitchell
based on connections. The links currently being forged between the International Girls Studies Association (IGSA) and Girlhood Studies is part of this. And our managing editor, Ann Smith, so exemplifies this in encouraging new academics to review
Making It Up
Intergenerational Activism and the Ethics of Empowering Girls
Emily Bent
( Downes et al. 2013 ; Huisman 2008 ; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2013 ). Whereas we, as girls’ studies scholars seek to actively disrupt and blur relational patterns of power in order to improve the lives of the girls we study ( Ackerly and True 2008
Anastasia Todd
the dynamic, robust community of disabled girls online. Generally, in girls’ studies scholarship, the intersection of being a girl and being disabled is rarely explored ( Stienstra 2015 ). Disability is most often “framed as a problem or lack,” and