Adolescent Girls & International Development

I was inspired to create a new course about the assumptions, discourses, policies, and practices that center on the 'potential' of girls and adolescent girl empowerment after working on a Nike Foundation 'Girl Effect' Project in India.

ID 276 Adolescent Girls and International is an upper level undergraduate course, also cross listed at the graduate level.

Course description: Over the past decade, the adolescent girl has risen to the top of the international development and gender-equality agendas. Donor agencies, international financial institutions, corporate philanthropists (including Warren Buffet and The Nike Foundation) and some nation-state governments argue that investment in girls can solve poverty, but only if they attend school and are protected from traditional social and cultural norms such as early marriage that threaten their educational trajectory. While efforts to educate girls are not new, educational goals and expectations for some girls may have changed. This course problematizes the promise of girls’ education, explores the multiple representations of girls, their problems and needs, and examines the rise of the adolescent girl to the forefront of gender equality agenda. We will analyze how current initiatives to educate and empower adolescent girls rely upon particular notions of a racialized, Third World Girl and therefore intersect with long-standing, global development processes and structures.

If you take this class with me, here is a sample of what you might read.

Books

1. Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2018. Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia. University of California Press (book is free online as a PDF or an ebook via Luminos)

2. Moeller, K. 2018. The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development. University of California Press.

Articles and Book Chapters

Andrea Cornwall and Maxine Molyneux. 2006. “The Politics of Rights: Dilemmas for Feminist Praxis: An Introduction.” Third World Quarterly 27(7): 1175-1191.

Croll, E. 2006. “From the Girl Child to Girls' Rights” Third World Quarterly 27(7): 1285-1297

Caron, C. and Margolin, S. 2015: “Rescuing Girls, Investing in Girls: A Critique of Development Fantasies.” Journal of International Development 27, 881-897.

Chant, S. 2016. Galvanizing girls for development? Critiquing the shift from ‘smart’ to ‘smarter economics’ Progress in Development Studies 16, 314–328.

Cobbett, M. 2014. “Beyond ‘victims’ and ‘heroines’: Constructing ‘girlhood’ in international development”. Progress in Development Studies 14, 309-320.

Ringrose, J. and D. Epstein. 2017. “Postfeminist Educational Media Panics, Girl Power and the Problem/Promise of ‘Successful Girls’” In: Michael A. Peters, B. Cowie and I. Menter (eds). A Companion to Research in Teacher Education. Springer.

Gervais, C. 2012: Boys meet girls’ rights: Bolivian adolescent males’ claims of commitment to gender equality. Children and Society 26, 356–367.

Bojin, K. 2013. Feminist Solidarity: no boys allowed? Views of pro-feminist men on collaboration and alliance-building with women’s movements. Gender and Development 21(2): 363-379.

M. Sommer, M.L. Schmitt, T. Ogello et al. 2018. “Pilot testing and evaluation of a toolkit for menstrual hygiene management in emergencies in three refugee camps in Northwest Tanzania”, Journal of International Humanitarian Action 3(6): 1-14.

Chmielewski et al. 2017. “Constructing risk and responsibility: a gender, race, and class analysis of news representations of adolescent sexuality” Feminist Media Studies