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Winner of the Best Book of 2008 from The International Gender and Language Association In this ground-breaking ethnography of girls on a playground, Goodwin offers a window into their complex social worlds. - Combats stereotypes that have dominated theories on female moral development by challenging the notion that girls are inherently supportive of each other - Examines the stances that girls on a playground in a multicultural school setting assume and shows how they position themselves in their peer groups - Documents the language practices and degradation rituals used to sanction friends and to bully others - Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-driven apps for health education and promotion can help in the accomplishment of several United Nations sustainable development goals. SnehAI, developed by the Population Foundation of India, is the first Hinglish (Hindi + English) AI chatbot, deliberately designed for social and behavioral changes in India. It provides a private, nonjudgmental, and safe space to spur conversations about taboo topics (such as safe sex and family planning) and offers accurate, relatable, and trustworthy information and resources. This study aims to use the Gibson theory of affordances to examine SnehAI and offer scholarly guidance on how AI chatbots can be used to educate adolescents and young adults, promote sexual and reproductive health, and advocate for the health entitlements of women and girls in India. We adopted an instrumental case study approach that allowed us to explore SnehAI from the perspectives of technology design, program implementation, and user engagement. We also used a mix of qualitative insights and quantitative analytics data to triangulate our findings. SnehAI demonstrated strong evidence across fifteen functional affordances: accessibility, multimodality, nonlinearity, compellability, queriosity, editability, visibility, interactivity, customizability, trackability, scalability, glocalizability, inclusivity, connectivity, and actionability. SnehAI also effectively engaged its users, especially young men, with 8.2 million messages exchanged across a 5-month period. Almost half of the incoming user messages were texts of deeply personal questions and concerns about sexual and reproductive health, as well as allied topics. Overall, SnehAI successfully presented itself as a trusted friend and mentor; the curated content was both entertaining and educational, and the natural language processing system worked effectively to personalize the chatbot response and optimize user experience. SnehAI represents an innovative, engaging, and educational intervention that enables vulnerable and hard-to-reach population groups to talk and learn about sensitive and important issues. SnehAI is a powerful testimonial of the vital potential that lies in AI technologies for social good.

This mixed-methods study examined gender differences in the social motivation and friendship experiences of adolescent boys and girls with autism relative to those without autism, all educated within special education settings. Autistic girls showed similar social motivation and friendship quality to non-autistic girls, while autistic boys reported having both qualitatively different friendships and less motivation for social contact relative to boys without autism and to girls with and without autism. Semi-structured interviews with the adolescents corroborated these findings, with one exception: autistic girls reported high levels of relational aggression within their friendships, suggesting that girls on the autism spectrum in particular may struggle with identifying and dealing with conflict in their social lives.

Hikikomori is a form of social withdrawal lasting more than 6 months with significant associated functional impairment. To date, numerous studies confirm the presence of this condition not only in Japan, where it was first described, but also globally abroad. This is an underestimated clinical condition, and it is emerging especially in adolescents and young adults, representing an increasing management problem for families and society. Prevalence ranges from 1.1% to 6.7%. Hikikomori can be associated with other neurodevelopmental disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Indeed, ASD and hikikomori share numerous characteristics confirmed by functional neuroimaging studies that have highlighted in both conditions the presence of alterations in cerebral regions related to social functioning. We present a case report regarding the history of a 14-year-old girl with characteristics compatible with ASD and hikikomori. At present, there are no specific treatments approved for hikikomori in ASD patients. Further studies are necessary to understand the link between the two conditions, the boundary, and possible overlap.

AbstractIn this article, we discuss a case study of a feminist society in a girls’ secondary school in England, highlighting how teenage girls use social media to combat sexism. Considering the recent growth of feminist societies in UK schools, there is still a lack of research documenting how young feminists use social media’s feminist content and connections. Addressing this gap, we draw on interviews and social media analyses to examine how girls navigate feminisms online and in school. Despite their multifaceted use of social media, the girls in our research undervalued digital feminism as valid or valued, in large part because of dismissive teacher and peer responses. We conclude by suggesting that schools need to cultivate social media as a legitimate pedagogical space by developing informed adult support for youth engagement with social justice-oriented online content.

Through an in-depth case study of the instant messaging practices of an adolescent girl who had migrated to the United States from China, this qualitative investigation examines the development of multiliteracies in the context of transnational migration and new media of communication. Data consisted of screen recordings of the youth's digital practices, interviews, and observations. Data analyses included qualitative coding procedures and orthographic analysis of the use of multiple dialects and languages in the youth's instant messaging exchanges. These exchanges illustrate the process of social and semiotic design through which the youth developed simultaneous affiliations with her local Chinese immigrant community, a translocal network of Asian American youth, and transnational relationships with her peers in China. The construction of transnational networks represents the desire of the youth to develop the literate repertoire that would enable her to thrive in multiple linguistic communities across countries and mobilize resources within these communities. This study contributes to new conceptual directions for understanding translocal forms of linguistic diversity mediated by digital technologies and an expanded view of the literate repertoire and cultural resources of migrant youth. As such, this study's contributions are not limited to the domain of digital literacies but extend to issues of linguistic diversity and adolescent literacy development in contexts of migration.

Despite extensive prevention strategies in Spain since the 1980s, gender-based violence, including among adolescents, remains prevalent, as observed in the Romance SUCC-ED Project (R&D&I Operating Programme ERDF Andalusia 2014–2020). This research study investigates the dimensions, meanings, relationships, and practices shaping the culture of romance in digital Andalusian adolescence (12–16 years) and its potential impact on school trajectories in Compulsory Secondary Education. Based on the premise that equality-focused relationship education is key to preventing gender violence, the study employs an ethnographic methodology with 12 Andalusian school case studies (4 out of them are located in rural areas) and 220 in-depth interviews (126 girls, 57.3%; 94 boys, 42.7%). This article aims to empirically explain gender violence in early adolescence by analysing the culture of romance as an explanatory factor. Findings reveal an interconnected model where dimensions (love, couple, sexuality, pornography, social networks, and cultural references), meanings (constructed by adolescents within each of them), relationships (partner), and practices (control and jealousy) reinforce romanticised femininity and dominant masculinity, thus explaining the high incidence of gender-based violence among students in the study.

Abstract Today, Black girls use social media, including TikTok, as sites for storytelling and for creating their own self-definitions. In this article, I address the question of how Black girls use social media aesthetics to construct digital narratives about their Black girlhoods. To do so, by analyzing a case study of TikToks, I explore the rise of the Soft Black Girl aesthetic and its connections to larger, white-dominated aesthetics, such as Cottagecore. Furthermore, I trace the political implications of social media sub-aesthetics that Black girls create, as well as how such sub-aesthetics are used to both deconstruct stereotypes pertaining to the adultification of Black girls and disengage from whiteness in online spaces.

In 2020, the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) marked its silver anniversary by releasing its sixth report on the representation of women in the global media landscape, and in 2021, the NGO Plan International unveiled the tenth edition of its report “State of the World’s Girls: The Truth Gap”. The study focused on how misinformation impacts equal opportunities for girls, adolescents, and young women worldwide, and proposed strategies to combat the “truth gap”. These examples showcase the collective efforts made in recent decades by professionals, academia, institutions, NGOs, and activists to enhance the state of information globally. The aspiration is ambitious, aiming to make information more transparent, accessible, and inclusive, fostering equality, truth-seeking, and the visibility of women, young people, and rural populations. However, the findings from the GMMP reports, as well as the analysis conducted by Plan International and numerous other works, underscore that despite evident social changes worldwide—particularly in the educational, labor, and social realms for women—access to truthful and high-quality information remains elusive. Simultaneously, studies reveal a declining public trust, especially among young people, in traditional media, a shift to alternative information sources, and a deterioration in the quality benchmarks of the journalism profession. Journalism, a pursuit of truth from sources to the public, has historically been and should remain a pillar upholding democracy and freedom. This article employs a qualitative case study methodology to analyze the best practices proposed across various domains to safeguard information quality. Special attention is given to initiatives that aim to involve women and young people in the collective effort against misinformation.