Pedagogical Responses to the Changing Position of Girls and Young Women

Academics and professionals working with young women face a series of paradoxes. Over the last 20 years, the lives of young women in the UK and Europe have been transformed. They have gained considerable freedom and independence, but at the very same time, new, less tangible forms of constraint and subordination now play a defining role in the formation of their everyday subjectivities and identities. Young women have come to exemplify the pervasive sensibility of self-responsibility and self-organisation. This new ‘gender regime’ demands both conceptualisation and practical response, drawing on educational research, social and cultural theory, and contemporary feminist thought.

Within the overarching theme of pedagogical responses to these trends, through work in schools and within young women’s online and face-to-face communities, this book interrogates the field of sexuality and its visualisation across new and old media in the context of often predictable and endemic ‘moral panics’ about teenage pregnancy rates, sexually transmitted diseases, and internet pornography. In exploring how girls and young women respond to increasing expectations of them as the vanguard of economic, social, and cultural change, contributors to this volume interrogate the ways in which social and educational aspiration interact with young women’s developing and embodied identities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogy, Culture and Society.

Carrie Paechter is Professor of Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her research centres on the intersection of gender, power and knowledge, the construction of gendered, spatialised and embodied identities, and the processes of curriculum negotiation. She is particularly interested on how children construct themselves as gendered, embodied, social actors.

Rosalyn George is Professor of Education and Equality at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her research is in the areas of social justice, education, and schooling, especially with regard to gender and race. Her current work focuses on recent forms of migration and its impact on the promotion of non-colour-coded racism.

Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her fields of expertise are young women and popular culture; feminist theory; the new creative economy; and the rise of 'cultural labour process'. Her current research includes an investigation of the working lives of young fashion designers in London, Berlin, and Milan.