Thinking Outside the Girl Box

“Written with great tenderness and insight, this book portrays West Virginia through the eyes of those who seldom appear in the literature about Appalachia: rural girls.”

“Thinking Outside the Girl Box reads as a delicious, compelling, collaborative ethnography that escorts readers into the delicate, rugged human terrain of life in Appalachia…. This book is beautifully accessible to undergraduates or graduates. Spatig and Amerikaner are gifted story-tellers. Together, with the young women and their mentors, they have crafted a sweet jewel, opening the box of ethnography, challenging the girdle of evaluation, asking us to peer inside the intimacy of growing up girl in rural America.”

“Thinking Outside the Girl Box will change the way you look at words like resiliency, development, democracy, girls. Spatig and Amerikaner remind their readers that a real feminist analysis begins with love and that its methodology is necessarily one of loving collaboration. In a period in which multinational agency after multinational agency is `discovering’ that girls exist, the story of the Girls Resiliency Program is a necessary one.”

“This is an extraordinary collaborative ethnography, one that authentically involves research participants in multiple stages of the research and writing processes. But it is also much more than this. It is, as Spatig and Amerikaner suggest, a love story that both warms and breaks the heart.”

“The Girls’ Resiliency Program helped middle- and high- school-aged girls find their voices through community building and social activism. In telling this story, authors Linda Spatig and Layne Amerikaner demonstrate what can happen when people are given the tools to build their strengths, speak out, and engage in changing the world. Good research opens questions for further study, and that is what makes Thinking Outside the Girl Box a vital work.” ~Nonprofit World

“Far too often theories become abstract and convoluted—losing connection to reality in the pursuit of ever higher levels of elaboration. Theorists cite other theorists to prove their erudition. This book, however, is a story that advances theory. Spatig and Amerikaner take life experience that they have felt—love, disappointment and suffering—and conceptualize that knowledge into critical theory. This book is not just about Appalachian girls. This book is about how we study and think about life around us. This book is about how scholars should expose social inequality and oppression and then write about it. When all is said and done what will be remembered are their conclusions about how we do our work and why.”

“This book exemplifies the possibilities of what can happen when outsiders tell stories about Appalachia.… It is a life history of an organization told through strong characters about lessons learned, loving and leaving, poetry and song, and questions of power, voice and language. I recommend it to those interested in Appalachian studies, girlhood studies, community based activism, and collaborative ethnography.”

“The aim of this book is to tell the story of rural, Appalachia girls in a youth development program –their lives presented through their own words, and the words of the authors, Spatig and Amerikaner, highlighting the girls’ challenges, struggles, fears, likes, and dislikes.… Situating these girls’ voices in a framework of ‘collaborative ethnography’ amidst a preferred research focus in the U.S. on quantitative, standardized, accountability models is refreshing, timely, accurate, and serves to highlight what we need to know most about girls’ and schooling.”

“Writing between hope and despair, and with tremendous grace, this extraordinary pair of mother-daughter researchers reveal the limits that young Appalachian women face in breaking free of the strictures of gender and the injury of being working class in America.”