Paper short abstract:

Ensuring that girls are seen as knowers and narrators of their own stories is essential. Our paper explores our creative, collaborative research on African Girlhoods with African girls. The flourishing of girls’ creative agency & incisive voices has given rise to vibrant scholarship on girlhoods.

Paper long abstract:

Ensuring that girls are seen to be knowers and narrators of their own stories is essential.

Our paper will situate our creative, participatory research on African Girlhoods with African girls, within the debates about global girlhoods and the emergence of girlhood studies as a discipline. Over the last century, girls, long ignored as sources of knowledge, have engaged in activism and creative endeavors to express their visions and aspirations for a future society inclusive of their needs. In the last decade a flourishing of girls’ creative agency and incisive voices has given rise to growing and vibrant scholarship on girlhoods & their politics, histories, economics, arts, & cultures.

Girlhood studies provides a critical means to counter the historical tendency of feminist scholarship to center adult women and marginalize or even ignore girls. While recent scholarship has shifted from focusing on girls as largely vulnerable and in need of protection, most of the research has been about girlhood in the Global North. Additionally, research on girlhoods by now better reflects a range of approaches that move beyond the focus on precarity in Africa.

By turning questions about empowerment away from how we empower girls to those about how societies, institutions, and families can support the ways in which girls have empowered themselves and address the ways they have been ignored, we can better understand and deal with issues related to African girls.

The presenters include two undergraduate research participants who will discuss the ethics and complexity of conducting theis work.