Girls, Generations, and Globalizations

1998 RIG-A-Fair

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This morning plenary panel will examine issues about work, sexuality, popular culture and intergenerationality. The title reflects a desire to expand the discourse about girls beyond today's media obsession with a narrow range of issues, specifically eating disorders, teenage pregnancy and the problem of girls' falling self-confidence as adolescence progresses.

This panel brings four distinguished speakers together to discuss their own research and to collectively envision a broad research agenda about girls and young women. They include:

Kathleen Karlyn, assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon and author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, who will address girls and popular culture. Karlyn’s current work considers the emergence of a number of television shows and movies that feature girls and young women as heroines - and why producers see girls as important media consumers.

Claudia Long, a private consultant with the National Indian Child Welfare Association and the Child Welfare Partnership at Portland State University, has done research on prenatal care and childbirth among Native American women and Native American resiliency. She will discuss teen pregnancy and intergenerational transfer of knowledge. Long is a member of the Nez Perce nation.

Carol Stack, professor of Women's Studies and Education at University of California, Berkeley, and author of the acclaimed books All Our Kin and Call to Home, who will focus on young people and work, specifically her research on low-income youth working in the fast-food industry in Oakland.

Sharon Thompson, author of Going All the Way: Teenage Girls' Tales of Sex, Romance and Pregnancy, and co-author of Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. Thompson will be talking about sexuality for girls. She spent almost a decade interviewing 400 girls from poor, working class and middle class backgrounds, with almost one third of her sample being girls of color. Her work is one of the few studies of teenage sexuality and pregnancy that draws on such a diverse sample, and that makes girls’ experiences the center of her narrative analysis.

This noon panel will bring together four scholars with research interests in Japan, Vietnam, Mali, and a number of other African countries to talk about critical issues facing girls on a global scale. The distinguished members of this panel include:

Joanne Leslie, adjunct associate professor in the Community Health Sciences Department at University of California, Los Angeles, and co-editor of Women, Work, and Child Welfare in the Third World. Leslie’s recent work focuses on adolescent health in Africa.

Karen Kelsky, assistant professor, Anthropology, University of Oregon, will discuss identity construction among girls and young women in Japan. Kelsky is currently completing a book manuscript for Duke University Press called, The Cosmopolitan Woman: Gender, Race, and Internationalism in Contemporary Japan.

Kadiatou Coulibaly Doucoure, graduate student in the Department of Educational Leadership, Technology and Administration, first came to the University of Oregon as a Fulbright scholar. Her dissertation focuses on the multiple obstacles girls face in enrolling and continuing in school.

Nguyen Ngoc Bich, graduate student in the Department of Educational Leadership, Technology and Administration at the UO, will discuss gender and higher education in Vietnam, with particular emphasis on the impact of economic restructuring in Vietnam on women’s educational needs and opportunities. Bich, an assistant professor in the Department of Vietnamese language and literature at the University of Hanoi for almost 15 years, has been instrumental in building the Vietnamese language program at the UO.