Founded in 2011, Girls Justice League is a girl-led gender justice non-profit approach of truth telling through dialogue, we reflect on a conversation in which six individuals representing current Girls Justice League youth leaders and adult allies offer viewpoints on this organization as a homeplace of meaning making. The conversation explores our past and present learnings about staying true to an intersectional vision of girls' activism while existing in a capitalist, patriarchal, adultist society based on misogynoir stereotypes, and future imaginings for gender-based activism and collective liberation through youth-adult partnership work.
In this article we explore how young Haryanvi Jaat women in urban India enact affective everyday forms of feminist resistance within patriarchal regimes that regulate sanctioned girlhood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with self-identified girls aged 18 to 24, we theorize what we refer to as relational transgression as a feminist practice enacted through the two micro-modal tactics that we call rigid timidity and girl time. These affective strategies transform compliance, silence, and waiting into means of negotiating gendered control and generating spaces of autonomy. By foregrounding less legible modes of resistance, we expand feminist conceptualizations of activism beyond public, organized protest to include relational acts through which girls imagine and sustain intergenerational feminist futures.
Transform Education is a transnational network connecting youth-led organizations advancing gender equality in and through education, housed in the United Nations Girls Education Initiative. Our research in the Leading Change project used digital storytelling to document experiences of 12 Transform Education youth activists from Africa and Asia and describe the impact of involvement in this network. Participants described Transform Education as an effective girl-and youth-led vehicle for amplifying their work and building a feminist collective that cultivates agency and community. They recommend the Transform Education / United Nations Girls Education Initiative partnership as a model of intergenerational collaboration.
In this article, I examine how Chamas en Acci & oacute;n (CheA) a community-driven feminist empowerment program in Peru, supports migrant adolescent girls who navigate gender-based violence, discrimination, and displacement. My analysis explores how its pedagogical components-participatory workshops, psychosocial support, family engagement, and a dedicated mentoring axis-create conditions for safety, belonging, and political emergence. Drawing on testimonios produced by girls and adult mentors, I show how care-centered practices, based on decolonial feminist ethics, enable participants to reinterpret their experiences, articulate demands, and engage in public action. I argue that mentorship, as one pillar of a broader empowerment model, functions as relational praxis that strengthens agency, fosters intergenerational solidarities, and sustains feminist continuity across territories.
