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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from Explore Bristol Research, http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk Author: Walters, Rosie C Title: “Outside of What the UN Want Us to Do” Girls’ Agency, Feminist Activism and the Negotiation of Girl Power Discourses in Girl Up General rights Access to the thesis is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International Public License. A copy of this may be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode This license sets out your rights and the restrictions that apply to your access to the thesis so it is important you read this before proceeding. Take down policy Some pages of this thesis may have been removed for copyright restrictions prior to having it been deposited in Explore Bristol Research. However, if you have discovered material within the thesis that you consider to be unlawful e.g. breaches of copyright (either yours or that of a third party) or any other law, including but not limited to those relating to patent, trademark, confidentiality, data protection, obscenity, defamation, libel, then please contact [email protected] and include the following information in your message: •Your contact details •Bibliographic details for the item, including a URL •An outline nature of the complaint Your claim will be investigated and, where appropriate, the item in question will be removed from public view as soon as possible. “Outside of What the UN Want Us to Do”: Girls’ Agency, Feminist Activism and the Negotiation of Girl Power Discourses in Girl Up Rosemary Clare Walters A dissertation submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements for award of the degree of PhD in Politics in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, May 2019. Seventy-six thousand, eight hundred and eighty-six. Abstract This thesis analyses girls’ agency in negotiating girl power discourses in international development. It focuses on the UN Foundation’s Girl Up campaign, which encourages girls in the Global North to fundraise towards girls’ education in the Global South as a means to solving global poverty. Girl Up has been critiqued for encouraging Southern girls to take individual responsibility for lifting their communities out of poverty, for depoliticising global and gender inequalities and for encouraging girls in the Global North to see themselves as the saviours of their Southern counterparts. However, there has been little research on how girls participate in campaigns such as Girl Up. My central research question asks how girls negotiate girl power discourses in the Girl Up campaign. I adopt a feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist theoretical approach in analysing data from focus groups with Girl Up members in the UK, US and Malawi. From girls in New York attending women’s marches to girls in Lilongwe raising money to keep their friends in school, the Girl Up members adapted the campaign to suit their own visions of empowerment, rejecting simplistic narratives of Northern saviours and Southern victims. They undertook activities of a more radical nature than was advocated by Girl Up, reflected critically on the Girl Up discourse, rejected its individualistic models of girls’ empowerment and interacted with their Northern/Southern counterparts in a spirit of mutual learning and respect. I came to conceptualise Girl Up club members as feminist activists, thus contributing to the emerging literature on girls’ political activism, which has historically been under theorised in the literature on politics, youth studies and gender and development. I conclude that scholars of development studies and campaigning organisations alike need to pay greater attention to girls as political subjects and to their many moments of resistance to dominant discourses. 2 Acknowledgements I am so grateful to all of the girls and their teachers who gave up their time to participate in this research, welcomed me to their schools and talked to me so openly. It was an absolute joy to meet you all. Your optimism about what your generation can achieve is contagious. My special thanks go to my supervisors, Jutta Weldes and Karen Tucker, who have been a constant source of support not only over the past four years but also since I started my first Masters degree in 2012. Thank you for your thoughtful and thorough critique, for your belief in my project and for pushing me to keep striving to improve it. Thank you for all of the times you read draft articles, conference papers and CVs. Thank you for your empathy in difficult times and your sense of humour in good ones. I am so grateful for all of the advice you have given me over the years about all things academic and for making me feel at ease talking about whatever else has been going on in my life too. Our supervision meetings have been both intellectually challenging and fun and I will miss them very much. This research was supported by Economic and Social Research Council studentship number 1488667 and I am very grateful to my funding body, without whom it would not have been possible. Thanks also to everyone at the South West Doctoral Training Partnership for their friendship and support. Thanks especially to Sonja, Jo and Rob for their encouragement to apply for various opportunities over the years. This journey has also been made so much more enjoyable by the friendship of my wonderful office mates from 1 Priory Road. It has been a privilege to work alongside you and see the beginnings of the incredible things you will all go on to do. It has been a pleasure being part of the vibrant research community in SPAIS and I am indebted to everyone at the Gender Research Centre for the many opportunities I have had to present my work and organise events. In particular, thanks to Sarah Childs for her mentorship during her time as the centre director. I am also grateful to Magnus Feldmann and Liz Evans for their constructive comments during my progression review meeting. It is thanks to the inspiration of Ruth 3 Glynn and Siobhan Shilton that I ever came to consider postgraduate study in the first place, and to the encouragement of colleagues and managers at the British Red Cross (especially Gemma Lewis, Lucy Tutton and Claire Pickman) that I took the decision to apply. Thanks also to Stephen McGlinchey, Director of E-International Relations, who has been a mentor to me since I started my first Masters degree and given me so many opportunities to take on exciting projects alongside the thesis. I have been so lucky to meet many feminist academics over the past few years who go out of their way to support junior scholars, many of them already named above, and I am grateful to Caroline Sweetman and her team at Gender and Development for their flexibility and understanding in making it possible for me to publish some of these findings while on maternity leave. My family are a constant source of love, joy and fun and this thesis, as with everything I do, would not have been possible without their support. Thanks especially to Mum, Dad, Tom, Becky and my grandparents. Thank you to Ian and Sara for looking after Laura while I made journal article revisions. Thanks also to my wonderful Bristol friends, especially Jess, Matt, Tasha, James and Abi, who are a second family to me. Thank you to my inspiring group of friends from school, who are an example of what a passionate, educated group of women can achieve. This thesis would not have been possible without the love and support of my partner Rob. Thank you for your daily kindness and understanding, for your sense of humour and for being the kind of father who takes six months of parental leave to be with his daughter. And finally, thank you to my daughter Laura, whose arrival one year ago turned my life upside down in the best possible way. Hoping to make you proud one day has been the biggest motivation to finish this thesis. This thesis is dedicated to the memories of my grandfather, William John Walters, who passed away one month before it was submitted, and of Hanissa, who passed away in 2017. She had already inspired so many of her peers with her plans to become a lawyer and fight for the rights of girls and women in Malawi. 4 Author’s Declaration I declare that the work in this dissertation was carried out in accordance with the requirements of the University’s Regulations and Code of Practice for Research Degree Programmes and that it has not been submitted for any other academic award. Except where indicated by specific reference in the text, the work is the candidate’s own work. Work done in collaboration with, or with the assistance of, others, is indicated as such. Any views expressed in the dissertation are those of the author. SIGNED: …………………………………………………………………. DATE: ……………………………………………. 5 Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 3 Author’s Declaration ............................................................................................................................... 5 List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 1 - Introduction ......................................................................................................................