Taking a Stand in a Postfeminist World offers an engaged cultural criticism in a postfeminist context. At the end of the twentieth century, an increasingly globalized world has given rise to a cultural complexity characterized by a rapid increase in competing discourses, fragmented subjectivities, and irreconcilable claims over cultural representation and who has the right to speak for, or about, "others." While feminism has traditionally been a potent site for debates over questions that have arisen out of this context, recently, it has become so splintered and suspect that its insights are often dismissed as predictable, seriously reducing its capacity to offer powerful cultural criticism. In this postfeminist context, the authors argue for a cultural criticism that is strategic, not programmatic, and that preserves the multiple commitments, ideas, and positions required of interactions and identifications across lines of cultural, racial, and gender difference. Selecting sites where such interactions are highlighted and under current scrutiny—film, consumer culture, tourism, anthropology, and the academy—the authors theorize and demonstrate the struggles and maneuvers required to "take a stand" on a wide range of issues of significance to the contemporary cultural moment.

Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world. Simidele Dosekun's interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist idea that their unapologetically immaculate beauty signals—but also constitutes—feminine power. As empowered global consumers and media citizens, the women deny any need to critique their culture or to take part in feminism's collective political struggle. Throughout, Dosekun unearths evocative details around the practical challenges to attaining their style, examines the gap between how others view these women and how they view themselves, and engages with ideas about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity across cultures and class. Intellectually provocative and rich with theory, Fashioning Postfeminism reveals why women choose to live, embody, and even suffer for a fascinating performative culture.

This collection of articles and artwork examines inclusive community development education, which engages members of diverse, often marginalised groups in research and education for social change. Community development education is the democratic and scholarly practice of involving everyday people, from all backgrounds, in the research-based process of designing, starting, and evaluating programs that meet people's needs. The book's varied contributions serve as personalised invitations to: work with others as equals, join democratic social projects, talk to people "you wouldn't have talked to before", value self-education, recognise contributions made by unpaid workers, invent ways to be non-violent, challenge passivity, and use democracy as a way to improve communities and the world. Addressing culture to science, chapters contain work carried out by younger and older scholarly activists in: Women's Studies, anti-racist and anti-colonial studies, history, the social sciences, global studies, community studies, media studies, horticulture, philosophy, education, co-operatives and community service, social-movement organising, project development, political art, and popular music. Each chapter contains diverse themes, comes from multidisciplinary research, and speaks to the subject of education for social change in individual ways. Contributions focus on popular education, self-education, self-defined group education, group-defined university projects, and scholarly activism in local to global movements.

A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment offers original essays that examine historical and contemporary approaches to conceptualizations of the body. In this ground-breaking work on the body and embodiment, the latest scholarship from anthropology and related social science fields is presented, providing new insights on body politics and the experience of the body Original chapters cover historical and contemporary approaches and highlight new research frameworks Reflects the increasing importance of embodiment and its ethnographic contexts within anthropology Highlights the increasing emphasis on examining the production of scientific, technological, and medical expertise in studying bodies and embodiment

This advanced analysis of gender issues in higher education represents a significant new turn in feminist thinking. Fractured Feminisms resists and reshapes boundaries by investigating how gender studies' intersection with race and ethnicity, class, postcoloniality, sexuality, globalization, interdisciplinarity, technology studies, and administration exposes the "silenced other" of feminisms themselves. These crucial conversations about feminisms depend upon facing the perplexing rhetorical problems within feminist debates, yet work within these fractures to discover newly emerging, productive feminist practices. This book contends that it's important to better understand the ways in which feminist rhetorics both empower and constrain and the kinds of identities feminisms afford as well as deny.

Advancing the rising field of engaged or participatory anthropology that is emerging at the same time as increased opposition from Indigenous peoples to research, this book offers critical reflections on research approaches to-date. The engaged approach seeks to change the researcher-researched relationship fundamentally, to make methods more appropriate and beneficial to communities by involving them as participants in the entire process from choice of research topic onwards. The aim is not only to change power relationships, but also engage with non-academic audiences.

Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so, based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popular books touting girls’ academic success. Girls are said to outperform boys in high school exams, university entrance and graduation rates, and professional certification. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls no longer need support. But in spite of the messages of post-feminism and neoliberal individualism that tell girls they can have it all, the reality is far more complicated. Smart Girls investigates how academically successful girls deal with stress, the “supergirl” drive for perfection, race and class issues, and the sexism that is still present in schools. Describing girls’ varied everyday experiences, including negotiations of traditional gender norms, Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby show how teachers, administrators, parents, and media commentators can help smart girls thrive while working toward straight As and a bright future.