Girlhood
About The Contributors
Hourig Attarian is a researcher and educator. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Faculty of Education, McGill University, in Montréal, Québec.
Helene Berman is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Western Ontario and a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children. She is co-editor of In the Best Interests of the Girl Child (with Yasmin Jiwani, 2002).
Michele Byers is an Assistant Professor at Saint Mary's University. She is the editor of Growing Up Degrassi: Television, Identity and Youth Cultures (Sumach Press, 2005).
Dawn H. Currie is Professor of Sociology and past Chair of the Women's Studies Programme at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers (University of Toronto, 1999).
Pamela J. Downe is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Her publications include leishmaniasis, Modelos de enfermedades, (Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan), and Gendered Intersections, an edited volume (with Lesley Biggs, Fernwood Publications, 2005).
Tatiana Fraser holds a BA in Women's Studies from the University of Ottawa and a Masters of Management for National Voluntary Sector Leaders from McGill University. She co-founded POWER Camp in 1995, and is currently the Executive Director of POWER Camp National.
Marnina Gonick is Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Women's Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Between Femininities: Ambivalence, Identity and the Education of Girls, (SUNY Press) and co-author of Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change (Palgrave Press).
Rachel Gouin is a doctoral candidate at McGill University where she is researching young women's learning as they engage in social action. Dedicated to her role as mother, student and activist, she is happy to be bilingual, and negotiates the boundaries of the two official languages that occupy her brain.
Yasmin Hussain is currently the Research Coordinator for the "Intersecting Sites of Violence in the Lives of Girls" project at the Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children in London, Ontario. She enjoys working with children in the after-school homework/learning support programmes in the community. The children have reacquainted her with the joy of colouring with crayons!
Yasmin Jiwani is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her publications include Rural Women and Violence in BC for the Department of Justice Canada, and Violence Prevention and the Girl Child for the Status of Women Canada (Phase I and II). She is also the author of Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender and Violence which will be published by UBC Press in 2006.
Deirdre M. Kelly is Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Pregnant with Meaning: Teen Mothers and the Politics of Inclusive Schooling (Peter Lang, 2000) and Last Chance High: How Girls and Boys Drop in and out of Alternative Schools (Yale University Press, 1993).
Azmina Ladha is about to finish her final year of school at Osgoode Hall. She has worked at the FREDA Centre for Research on Violence against Women & Children in Vancouver, and in 2004, she developed Go Girls, an activity-based leadership program for marginalized young women.
Jo-Anne Lee teaches in the Women's Studies Department at the University of Victoria. She co-edited Situating Race and Racisms in Space, Time and Theory (McGill-Queen's, 2005). She is the President of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and the founder of Anti-dote, a network for multi-racial girls and young women in Victoria.
Rian Lougheed-Smith is currently entering her second year at Mount Allison University. Rian is also an artist, a writer and a past volunteer/participant in research and is currently working at the Muriel McQueen Research Centre on Violence.
Barb MacQuarrie is the Community Director at The Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children. Currently she is a National Coordinator for the research initiative, "Intersecting Sites of Violence in the Lives of Girls."
Sarah Mangle worked with POWER Camp National as Network Director as the Girls' Club Coordinator. A recent graduate of Concordia University with a BFA in Studio Art, Sarah is an artist, musician, and writer.
Claudia Mitchell is a James McGill Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. She is the co-author of Researching Children's Popular Culture: Cultural Spaces of Childhood (Routledge, 2002) and the co-editor of Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood (Peter Lang, 2005); Not Just Any Dress: Dress, Body and Identity (Peter Lang, 2004); and Just who do we think we are: Methodologies for Self-Study (Routledge-Falmer, 2005).
Michele Polak is currently a doctoral student at Miami University of Ohio. She attributes most of her work to her nieces: Amanda, who first showed her aunt that there is a whole girl world online that she never knew existed, and Nicole who will talk about her period to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Romy Poletti is completing her final year in the Media, Information and Technoculture program at the University of Western Ontario. Her interest in girls' and women's issues led her to work on the Identifying Intersecting Sites of Violence in the Lives of Girls study.
Shauna Pomerantz is completing her Ph.D. in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, entitled, Dressing the Part: Girls, Style, and School Identities, is a year-long ethnographic study of how girls negotiated their identities at an urban and multicultural high school in Vancouver.
Rebecca Raby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. Her girlhood included building forts in the woods and sneaking to the store for candy. As well as sporty things like squash, her spare time includes writing short stories about childhood.
Candis Steenbergen is completing her Ph.D. in the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University in Montréal, where she is working on her dissertation investigating the interplay between generational rhetoric, nostalgia, and feminisms in Canada. She is the editor of Transforming Spaces: Girlhood, Agency and Power. (POWER Camp National/Filles d'Action, 2004).
Fathiya Wais traveled from the horn of Africa to this native land in February 1991. Known for her sharp humour and spirited personality, Fathiya has completed a diploma in social sciences (University of Ottawa) and is currently pursuing graduate studies in Anthropology.
Ashley Ward has just finished her second year in the Print Journalism Program at Centennial College. She is also a successful reporter who has been published in the East Toronto Observer and The Courier. She has been involved with the Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children for the past three years.
Sophie Wertheimer is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Communication Studies at the University of Calgary. Pretty in Panties is strongly informed by her experiences as a woman who was a little girl not so long ago; who remembers vividly the complexities, pains and pleasures of growing up girl in Canada.
Hermig Yogurtian lives in Montréal. Now the mother of two adolescent girls, she is (still) trying to come to grips with her own girlhood, and a few others that came and went before hers, and made it what it was.