We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Girlhood Studies has just been published. With this issue, Girlhood Studies begins its tenth year. To celebrate this anniversary, we’re offering a 20% discount on all subscriptions to the journal.
Below, Editor-in-Chief Claudia Mitchell commemorates a decade of the journal. We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Claudia Mitchell for receiving the SSHRC Gold Medal!
In 2007, I, along with colleagues Jackie Kirk and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, proposed to Berghahn Books that we edit a journal devoted to the study of girlhood. After seeing the enthusiastic response of scholars and communities participating in several international girlhood conferences, including one convened at the University of London in 2001 and another at Concordia University in Montreal in 2003, we knew that such a journal was needed. We drew on all our networks to come up with a wonderful editorial board, commissioned articles by leading scholars writing about girlhood, and by early in 2008 we were well on the way to producing the first issue of the journal. I wish I could just say that the rest is history but of course anyone who knows about the early days of the journal will know that as the articles for the first issue were going to press in August 2008, Jackie Kirk was killed in Afghanistan as she was carrying out a missi
on on girls’ education with the International Rescue Committee. Looking back, it is hard now to even fathom how we carried on after that, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh and I owe a great debt to Ann Smith who stepped in as Managing Editor. I also owe a lot to Berghahn Books for their amazing support for the journal and the ways in which they have promoted it. Alongside winning several awards including that for best new journal in the Social Sciences and Humanities from the Association of American Publishers in 2009, the journal now has accreditation through various international indices.
Now, in 2017, Girlhood Studies begins its tenth year. It is a tribute to our guest editors and contributors that we have been able to take on such a range of topics and concerns. Quantitatively, we have passed the one million mark in relation to the number of words about girlhood in the first twenty issues of the journal. The various guest editors have tackled such critical issues as critiques of girl power, girls and post-conflict, girls and health, girlhood studies and media, dolls and play, memory work methodologies in the study of girlhood, literary texts and girlhood, visual disruptions, girlhood and disabilities, Indigenous girlhoods, and ethical practices in girlhood studies. Alongside these topic-based themes, guest editors have taken on girlhood in specific geo-political contexts as can be seen in the special issues on Nordic girlhood and on girlhood in post socialist societies. The special section on Indigenous girlhood in GHS 9(2) is, I believe, groundbreaking for its focus and for the fact that it was guest edited by young Indigenous women. Other issues such as that on ethical practices in girlhood studies have helped launch a new thematic area in feminist studies.
I am grateful to all the guest editors and contributors who have been so committed to this academic and activist field of study. I also would like to highlight the role of reviewers. As we know the peer review process relies on the unrewarded generosity of reviewers to offer thoughtful, knowledgeable, and productive comment.
For more about the journal, visit the website.
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