Welcome to Girl Museum’s interview series, Why We Need Girls’ Studies, for 2024. We have many exciting interviews this year with important scholars in the field to get insights about what we are all doing in this space to further our understanding of girlhood and girls’ experiences.
This month’s interview is with Jen Almjeld, Professor of English and Rhetoric at Jame Madison University. Almjeld’s research centers on digital rhetorics, identity performances, feminist methodologies and community engagement. Her recent work considers ways that gendered identities and digital spaces intersect to encourage certain identities and empower and limit identity performances. Almjeld is particularly interested in girlhood identities in regard to girls as technology users and girls as leaders. For several years she has lead girls’ technology and leadership summer camps and afterschool programs and is currently researching the language of leadership related to girls and girlhood.
Why do you consider it important to study girlhood?
With my background in Writing Studies, I spend a lot of time thinking about power and discourse and what voices are heard and what voices are ignored. I think girls’ voices are especially important to attend to because they are at least doubly marginalized – by gender and age – and also often further marginalized by things like socioeconomic status, racial identity and ethnicity. I was lucky enough to be brought in on a girls’ technology summer camp in grad school by my mentor and girl advocate Dr. Kristine Blair and since then I feel like I have been answering this question on every job interview, when pitching classes to other colleagues and upper administrators and even in my own scholarship. I think it’s important to study girlhood because it has been erased for so long. Historically, when we have bothered to focus on children’s experiences or points of view at all, those experiences were filtered through a masculine lens – as so much of our history is. Taking girls, their voices and ideas and their lived experiences seriously enriches our knowledge and scholarship and, most importantly, might help girls take themselves more seriously and be better prepared to be equal citizens in our world as women.
Girlhood Studies and feminist studies are not the same in my mind, but they influence one another in important ways. If we take girls more seriously, I think we might also take women more seriously in our world. As long as feminist and gender studies is important – and just turn on the news or talk to a neighbor and you know we need them both – Girlhood Studies will be too. I also think studying girlhood is an important opportunity for students in our universities. In a 2022 article for Girlhood Studies journal, I argue that courses in girlhood are great additions to general education because they help students empathize with and attend to identities that differ from their own and also give them the tools to interrogate other subject positions. I think studying and taking seriously – both academically and ethically – girls and their lives helps us see and take seriously other marginalized identities.
Girlhood studies is a relatively new field, yet it is rapidly changing. What are the biggest opportunities for those interested in studying girlhood?
One of the things I love most about Girlhood Studies as a field is the ingrained interdisciplinarity. There are so many ways to come at this work: for me it’s writing, but for others it might be education or film or art or design or medicine or even leisure studies. There’s something for everyone as long as you make girls and girls’ perspectives the focus. The other thing I love about studying girlhood is how rooted it is in activism and advocacy. I’ve always been the kind of researcher that wants to do something with my work beyond just publishing it. Studying girlhood is a perfect way to put scholarship into action in the world. You can work with girls as collaborators, as experts, as opinion holders and problem solvers. I think the main thing is to resist the urge to fix or help girls, an urge I think lots of us have early in our career, but instead to position yourself to learn alongside and from girls. Positioning girls as knowledge makers allows us to be better advocates with and for them and also expands our view of the world.
What is the biggest challenge facing girlhood studies? Do you have ideas on how we can address it?
I think a big challenge for those working in girlhood is one that is faced by any scholar that engages local communities. Higher education has a reputation of going in to fix or save when they should instead by partnering. Seeing girls and girl communities as locations of new knowledge and agents of change is so important to making the work both ethical and sustainable. Working with and in communities builds relationships and those relationships should be based on respect and reciprocity. If we can avoid approaching girls with any sort of deficit model, I think we run a better chance of building important knowledge and equipping the girls we partner with to advocate for themselves and for others.
Finally, please feel free to plug any current projects or publications that you want to highlight.
Here’s a bit of info on me and what I’m working on and have done – just in case you need it.
I’m currently working on a monograph called Feminist Activism and the Rhetoric of Fatness: Negotiating Girlhood and Body Positivity Online that is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing.
Past girlhood work includes:
“Archiving as Learning: Digital archives as heuristic for transformative undergraduate education.” In Unsettling Archival Research, edited collection by Gesa Kirsch, Romeo García, Caitlin Burns and Walker Smith. Southern Illinois Press, 2023, 240-259.
“Gen Ed Girlhood: Artifact-centric Approach Invites New Students to Girlhood Studies.” Girlhood Studies, 15.3 (2022), 99-112.
“Transforming Identities: Theorizing place(s) and spaces(s) in community engagement
pedagogy.” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 25.4 (2021), 59-73.
“Not Your Mother’s Tech Camp: Rebooting Girls’ Technology Camps to Equip the Next Generation of Technofeminists.” Computers and Composition, special issue “Technofeminism: (Re)Generations and Intersectional Futures. 51(2019): 55-67.