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This work offers an introduction to the use of photography, collaborative video, drawing, objects, multi-media production and installation in research. The author explains how visual methods can be used as modes of inquiry as well as modes of representation for social research. The book looks at a range of conceptual and practical approaches to a range of tools and methods, while also highlighting the interpretive and ethical issues that arise when engaging in visual research. She draws on her own work in the field of visual research throughout to offer extensive examples from a variety of settings and with a variety of populations. Topics covered include: Photographs and memory work studies; Drawing as a participatory visual methodology; Working with images, Writing about images; Can visual methods make a difference? : from practice to policy. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of visual research, producing a practical introduction to the subject

We open this issue with two articles about different kinds of playacting. First, we have Alude Mahali's "A Girlhood Disrupted: Performing Memory Using the Girlfriend Aesthetic" in which she discusses her play, Katuntu (…and you too), that she wrote to "depict loss caused by an uprooted girlhood, [that portrays] the consequences of fragmented memory on Black African women with immigrant pasts, in the hope that it might resonate with others who share the experience of similarly disrupted girlhood." For her, the girlfriend aesthetic provides a way of "re-membering by providing a reflective surface upon which one sees in the experience of the girlfriend other, something that incites one's own memory."

Studying the textual spaces of girlhood is a complex task for we have to consider the textual readings derived through literary and document analysis along with producer texts as read through the experiences of girls themselves. Studying textual spaces can extend even into a consideration of material space and how we might engage in decolonizing practices that attend to the dynamics of power and colonial violence. This investigation into a broad range of textualities serves as a reminder of the past, a consideration of the present, and a looking towards imagined futures. It also helps us to appreciate the interrelatedness of textual spaces so that that it is possible to consider what might be regarded as classics of colonial literature for girls alongside new platforms for addressing social justice and how they might inform each other. It is only in an unthemed issue of Girlhood Studies that addressing such a wide range of texts and textualities is possible.

This Special Issue on African Girlhoods is long overdue for many reasons, not least of which is its recognition, as guest editors Marla L. Jaksch, Catherine Cymone Fourshey, and Relebohile Moletsane point out, of the somewhat vexed history of the discourse of the African girl-child that dates back to the global development literature of the early 1990s attached to the Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace, held in Beijing in September, 1995—typically referred to just as Beijing. This, and the many country and regional conferences leading up it were (and still are) game-changers in so many ways when it comes to the lives of girls and women. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that I participated readily in the early days of defining the girl-child when I was working as a short-term UNICEF consultant in Zambia to develop an agenda for the Ministry of Education and other policy actors for research about education for girls in Zambia. One of the events in which I participated in Lusaka in October 1994 as part of my fact-finding and local consulting was a meeting of 80 or more local NGO members and other Zambian women who were planning their submissions to the November 1994 African Platform for Action: Fifth African Regional Conference (Dakar) on Women preparatory to Beijing. As an observer at this meeting, I heard a presenter talk about the fact that she was one of the first women (if not the first) in Zambia to graduate from university. This was in 1994 and at the time I could see that giving any recognition and support to ordinary girls and their education was full of possibilities, if very complicated. But I regard all this as just as much a part of the development of Girlhood Studies as was the work in North America on girls and science in the late 1980s. As I note elsewhere on charting girlhood studies (Mitchell 2016) we now know that just getting more girls into science was equally complicated.

A dream, dating back to 2001 when the late Jackie Kirk, Jacqui Reid-Wash, and I passed through a section labelled Girls Studies in Foyles Books on Charing Cross Rd., London, UK, was that someday there would not only be a journal devoted to girlhood studies but also a whole interdisciplinary teaching area. We talked about how students of youth studies, or childhood studies, or what was then called women's studies might consider girlhood studies as an option in their programs or as a whole area of specialization. The dream of the journal was realized seven years later with the first issue of Girlhood Studies in 2008. Since then, as the guest editors of this Special Issue on Teaching Girlhood Studies highlight, there have been many initiatives including the development of courses on Girlhood Studies, and community/university activist projects. And now, finally, we have a whole issue devoted to teaching, curricula, and pedagogies of Girlhood Studies.

This issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, while unthemed in the sense that it comes out of an Open Call, reminds us that a foundational principle of Girlhood Studies remains one of contesting and challenging inequities. Furthermore, how girls themselves might, under some circumstances, take up critical issues in their lives is evident in these contributions. Each of the contributors has placed front and centre the idea of contesting. Recently in a publications panel at a graduate student conference, participants, eager to get their work published, wanted to know more about this journal. Two of their questions stand out. "May the articles be quantitative as well as qualitative?" and "Is it enough that at least half of my participants are girls?" This collection of articles responds beautifully to these questions in offering an affirmative to the question about quantitative and qualitive data when the point is to use appropriate evidence to contest gender norms, and a negative to being about representation in terms of simply including girls.

Sometimes the evolution of an open call issue of Girlhood Studies results in something of a girls studies reader unto itself. Since this issue is packed full of criss-crossing themes based on work in several countries—Canada, Iceland, India and the US—there is just no room for editorial commentary. In its inclusion of works on intersectional feminisms and feminist and Indigenous-led critique to school-based and intergenerational interventions and the power of the visual, this issue is something of such a reader.

This Special Issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal represents another milestone in the history of the journal, coming, as it does, out of the second international conference of the International Girls' Studies Association (IGSA) that was hosted by Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana, in 2019. As the guest editors, Angeletta Gourdine, Mary Celeste Kearney, and Shauna Pomerantz highlight in their introduction, the conference itself and the Special Issue set in motion the type of dialogue and conversation that is crucial to challenging and changing the world of inequities and disparities experienced by girls. For a relatively new area of study that has roots in feminism and social change, critical dialogue about inclusion and exclusion and about ongoing reflexivity and questioning must surely be at the heart of girls studies. The guest editors capture this admirably when they replace the question "What is girlhood studies?" with the provocative and generative question, "What can girlhood studies be?" The articles and book reviews in this Special Issue tackle what girls studies could be in so many different ways, ranging from broadening and deepening notions of intersectionality and interdisciplinarity to ensuring a place for the article, "Where are all the Girls and Indigenous People at IGSA@ND?" co-authored by the girls who belong to the Young Indigenous Women's Utopia group. Such an account offers a meta-analysis of the field of girlhood studies, but so did the call for the Special Issue as a whole. It is commendable that this team of co-editors assembled and curated a series of articles that reveal the very essence of the problematic that girlhood studies seeks to address.

I met Roxanne Harde, the guest editor of this Special Issue, at the Second International Girls Studies Association conference in 2019 when I attended the panel discussion, "Representations of Rape in Young Adult Fiction." I recall Roxanne's passion vividly and, indeed, the enthusiasm of all three presenters as they discussed a variety of texts in superb presentations that aligned well with Ann Smith's notion of feminism in action in their seeing "a fictional text not only as a literary investigation into issues of concern to its author but also as the site of educational research" (2000: 245). Their papers pointed to the ways in which the analysis of how rape culture is treated in Young Adult (YA) literature, film, and the print media can take scholars and activists so much further into the issues, and, at the same time, noted the ways in which rape culture in all its manifestations as a global phenomenon has inevitably led to its becoming an everyday topic of YA fiction.

In March 2019, I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Peter Green College at the University of British Columbia that I called "The Politics and Possibilities of Girl-led and Youth-led Arts-based Activism to Address Gender Violence." I wanted to highlight in particular the activist work of numerous groups of Indigenous girls and young women in a current project and the youth AIDS activist work of the Fire and Hope project in South Africa but I also wanted to place this work in the context of girls' activism and youth activism more broadly. To do this I started out with a short activity called "Know your Girl Activist" during which I showed PowerPoint photos of some key girl and young women activists of the last few years, and asked the audience if they could identify them. The activists included two Nobel Prize Peace Prize winners, Malala Yousafzai (2014) and Nadia Murad (2018) along with Autumn Pelletier, the young Indigenous woman from Northern Ontario, Canada, well known for her work on water activism, and, of course, Greta Thunberg, now a household name but then, in 2019, already well known for her work on climate change activism. To my surprise only some of these activists were recognized, so, during the Q and A session, when I was asked if there is a history of girls as activists I could see that this question indicated clearly the urgent need for this special issue of Girlhood Studies which was only just in process then. Now, thanks to the dedication of the two guest editors of this special issue, Catherine Vanner and Anuradha Dugal and the wide range of superb contributors, I can point confidently to girls' activism as a burgeoning area of study in contemporary feminism rooted in feminist history.

This first issue of Girlhood Studies in 2020 brings together a collection of articles and reviews that pose, as a whole, critical questions about the ways in which conventional yet imaginative textual genres such as literature, film, and comics can sometimes line up in fascinating ways with the imaginative texts of space and place in the metro underground transport network of Helsinki or the farming communities of Scotland.

The concerns addressed by the authors in this issue point to the need for a reimagining of girlhood as it is currently framed by settler and carceral states. To quote the guest editors, Sandrina de Finney, Patricia Krueger-Henney, and Lena Palacios, "The very notions of girl and girlhood are embedded in a colonial privileging of white, cis-heteropatriarchal, ableist constructs of femininity bolstered by Euro-Western theories of normative child development that were—and still are—violently imposed on othered, non-white girls, queer, and gender-nonconforming bodies." Indigenous-led initiatives in Canada, such as the Networks for Change: Girl-led 'from the Ground up' Policy-making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa project, highlighted in four of the eight articles in this issue, along with the insights and recommendations offered in the articles that deal with the various positionalities and contexts of Latinx and Black girls, can be described as creating a new trail. In using the term trail, here, I am guided by the voices of the Indigenous researchers, activists, elders, and community scholars who participated in the conference called More Than Words in Addressing Sexual and Gender-based Violence: A Dialogue on the Impact of Indigenous-focused, Youthled Engagement Through the Arts on Families and Communities held in Montreal. Their use of the term trail suggests a new order, one that is balanced between the ancestors and spiritual teachings on the one hand, and contemporary spaces that need to be decolonized on the other with this initiative being guided by intergenerationality and a constant interrogation of language. The guest editors of this special issue and all the contributors have gone a long way on this newly named trail.

As this issue of Girlhood Studies went to press, two very dramatic moments in the history of girls and young women were in the public eye. One was the large 8000-strong gathering of NGOs, researchers, politicians, and activists from 165 countries at the Women Deliver Global Summit on gender equality that took place in Vancouver, Canada, from 3 to 6 June 2019. There, according the program, the focus was on how power can both hinder and drive progress and change for a world that is more gender equal. On 3 June, the long-awaited report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada was released, with its 231 recommendations or calls for social justice to address what is now acknowledged as being part of what was (and continues to be) cultural genocide. Both the Global Summit and the report on MMIWG are reminders of the need for the blend of scholarship and activism that is so critical to advancing issues of equity and to implementing recommendations to achieve this. This unthemed issue with its broad range of geographic locations, concerns, and methods and its attention to activism, along with scholarship that features work from both the humanities and social sciences, is key in relation to mobilizing a social justice agenda.

I am very grateful to Barbara Brickman, the guest editor of this Special Issue
of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for her term "dislodging girlhood"
in the context of heteronormativity. Repeatedly in this issue Marnina
Gonick's pivotal question, "Are queer girls, girls?" (2006: 122) is cited. In
the 13 years since she posed this question, we have not seen enough attempts
made to address it. To mix my metaphors I see this issue of Girlhood Studies
as helping to break the silence and simultaneously to open the floodgates to
a ground-breaking collection of responses to Gonick's question. Given the
rise of the right in the US and in so many other countries, queer girls—
trans, lesbian, gender non-conforming, non-binary to mention just a few
possibilities—are at even greater risk than before. Girlhood Studies has always
been concerned with social justice, so this special issue is a particularly
important one in our history. It is also worth noting that many of the articles
are written or co-authored by new scholars, signaling an encouraging trend
in academic work that has social justice at its core. I thank Barbara Brickman,
the authors, and the reviewers for their history-making contributions
to the radical act of dislodging girlhood.

Claudia Mitchell – PhD, James McGill Professor, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Email: Claudia.mitchell@mcgill.ca
Turbulent times in relation to sexual violence in the lives of girls and young women call for solidarity and global action. One of the effects of globalization is the increased recognition of a borderless world that, in some ways, erases the boundaries between 'over there' and 'over here', challenging some of the distinctions behind a Global North and a Global South. In this article, I offer an analysis of the issues behind sexual violence, which frame the possibilities for research teams working with girls and young women across the Global North and the Global South. At the same time, I highlight the possibilities for learning more about North-North and South-South interactions. What would such an approach entail and what kinds of strategies are useful for sustaining such a strategy in combating sexual violence? In particular, how can such a framework support dialogue? In order to address these questions the article suggests a practical framework which draws on the findings from a Canada-South Africa project, Networks for Change and in particular focuses on the importance of advocating for a public voice for girls and young women that is framed within an activist agenda. The article refers to this approach as a 'circles within circles' approach, arguing for both bringing together girls and young women who have been involved in participatory visual work from a number of country contexts, and ensuring that the circle puts girls and young women at the centre.