Knowing About Girls - How we can learn from social media.

This paper is about the problem of knowledge posed by 'girls'. Apart from Girls Studies, girls are relatively scattered or absent in formal knowledge systems. But girls are all over the internet and social media, as producers, users and as representations in discourse. How might formal disciplines - scientific and cultural - integrate with social media to answer the questions: what are girls, where did they come from, and how do we know? The paper works through some of the issues at stake in order to set up a distinctive and hopefully useful approach for answering them. It is organised into two parts: 'Girls in the wild' and 'Girls in the world'. It concludes that girls are a culture-made group, evolving - not without struggle - into a self-organising, self-conscious, global class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]