Adolescent girls face increased pressure to conform to societal standards. As social beings, adolescent girls gravitate to social media as an outlet for peer interaction, community, and validation. Research has found that at the critical age of adolescence, 12-18, girls experience appearance comparison on social media, which can lead to…

This ethnographic study examines a girls-only summer maker program designed to empower girls who learned to use power tools to build their own designs. Drawing from theories of identity construction within figured worlds, the article shows how girls in the program authored themselves into roles that run counter to patriarchal notions of making and…

These days, children are exposed to a variety of information sources and channels, which create more complex interactions than ever before. It is important, therefore, to develop and reinforce children's self-leadership. The present work is a narrative qualitative study focusing on the story of Lile, a 14-year-old Israeli girl who was assessed as…

Limited research has examined intrapersonal psychological empowerment (PE) among Black girls solely. This study aims to fill a gap in empowerment literature by examining the factor structure of the Sociopolitical Control Scale for Youth (SPCS-Y) among Black girls (N = 377) between the ages of 14-17 years old. We also examine the association with…

Although research has been done to explore social media as a safe space with Black girls (Womack, 2013), there is limited research that assesses social media as a counter space for Black girls' literacies. According to The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (2017), Black teens are the largest users of Instagram and SnapChat.…

This article focuses on how Black girls counter the antiBlackness that pervades the culture of STEM/making through their STEM-rich, community-engaged co-making practices. As youth engage each other, their communities, and the world, they make in ways that respond to a critical awareness of the world as it is, and with a desire to agentically…

Background and Context: In 2016, our team designed and implemented a cluster-randomized trial of a school-based empowerment training program, targeting adolescent girls in Nairobi, Kenya (Baiocchi et al., 2019; Rosenman et al., 2020). In that study, the primary outcome was the experience of sexual violence in the prior year. Participants disclosed…

In this article, we use the framework "knowledgeable agents of the digital" to understand the agentic experiences of one adolescent Black girl's digital and STEAM literacy practices. After discriminatory acts deterred Star's interest in exploring STEAM literacy practices in school, her involvement in a digital application workshop for…

This piece builds on scholarship in African American parading and Black Girls' Literacies by presenting parading as a metaphor to analyze a website created by nine Black adolescent girls. I draw on multimodal analysis frameworks to understand the symbolic nature of the site and its components, as well as how the girls use it as a platform to speak…

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in widespread school closures globally, including in Kenya. This educational disruption had potential adverse consequences for adolescent school learners including school dropout, learning loss, opportunity losses, loss of previously acquired skills, and loss of socio-emotional benefits of time spent with peers and…

For many years, Techbridge Girls focused its weekly sessions on stand-alone lessons that asked participants to develop products that fulfilled specific criteria, such as "create the bounciest rubber ball," "build the tallest paper tower," or "design the largest bubbles." These activities typically lasted one or two…

The responsiveness of at-risk adolescent Ethiopian girls to the contents of a workshop promoting their occupational aspirations was found to be related to their belief in their ability to negotiate the unwelcome ethno-racial gaze of Israeli society. This belief is closely tied to the way they perceive and experience their ethno-racial blackness --…

This paper examines video data of a high school robotics team to explore practices that empower youth from underrepresented groups in engineering to disrupt traditional boundaries around what engineering is and who is considered competent to participate in its practice. We analyze in-the-moment positioning work with a focus on care and maintenance…

Research on inclusion for students with emotional-behavioral disabilities (EBD) has typically focused on male participants, because data are limited on female students who fit the criteria for having an EBD and are often misdiagnosed. This qualitative case study adds to the very limited research on the inclusion experiences of girls with EBD.…

Background: Domestic abuse is a public health issue, and increasing evidence suggests that young women are more likely to suffer than older women, yet limited evidence exists in England about educational and intervention programmes for young women at risk. Study's objectives: To evaluate a gender-specific (women-only) programme aimed at educating…