Michele Paule

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Reader at Oxford Brookes University

Who Runs the World? takes research into girlhood, leadership and visibility in a new critical direction. Drawing on research conducted with girls in schools and youth organizations, it investigates what girls apprehend leadership to mean both in their own lives and for women in the public eye. Research participants range from girls at elite indepen...

This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye within a framework suggested by Janet Newman’s (2015) distinction between individual ‘aspiration’ and collective ‘hope’ in political contexts of austerity. The project responds to the contemporary turn to the agentic, aspiring girl as the solution to the...

This article examines the attitudes of state-school educated girls under contexts of neoliberal austerity at a moment when discourses surrounding inherited privilege and race intensified in popular culture. Using interviews with 50 girls aged 13–15 at the time of the wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, we examine attitudes to Meghan as...

An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in decision-making positions in adulthood. The power of leadership exists in a close relationship with public visibility, and this relationship is regularly foregrounded in adult interventions that seek to stimulate girls’ leadership aspirations through the pu...

To present an interdisciplinary collection with ‘neoliberal’ in the title is, in the twenty-first century academy, a risky business. The risk lies in the term’s ubiquity. Writers across social, cultural and economic fields seem to agree that the use of ‘neoliberal’ has become too lazy, too vague and too readily used to denounce (Peck in Territ, Pol...

Two questions framed the seminar series that formed the basis for this collection: How is success experienced through the neoliberal life cycle? What accommodations are required in order to be successful, and what resistances are identified as necessary to sustain other ways of living well? Looking over the interdisciplinary range of papers present...

In this chapter, I consider a totemic figure of the early twenty-first century—the successful girl—in the context of the legacy of UK New Labour’s ‘Gifted and Talented’ policies and of girls’ success as a defining trope of the period. Highly achieving girls have been a focus of discourses of choice, of self-improvement, and of postfeminist optimism...

In this timely collection, contributors from a number of disciplines discuss neoliberal visions of success, and the subsequent effects they have on the construction of the lifecycle. Frequently mentioned in popular political discourse, the notion of neoliberalism is often deployed as shorthand for the consensus that austerity is necessary and the h...

This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of achieving girlhood, and the ways in which girls themselves participate in such circulation. It examines the figure of the achieving girl within wider discourses of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, considering the tensions involved in being both 'succe...

The persistence of gendered learning myths in educational contexts and the wider imaginary continues to trouble feminist educational researchers and practitioners. The tracing of such myths and the categories they create through authoritative and elite discourses of the past suggests how they have functioned across different fields to preserve a hi...

In this presentation I consider a totemic figure of the early 21st century – the successful girl ─ and some ways in which neoliberal and postfeminist choice discourses coalesce around her. The study on which I draw explores the nature and circulation of achieving girl discourses across school and media contexts. The smartgirls.tv project examines s...

Drawn from a larger research project exploring discourses of ability and gender, this paper identifies a narrative theme, ‘Girls Find God’, emerging both from teen-orientated television dramas and as a topic of discussion among participants in an online forum, www.smartgirls.tv . It considers the relationship between teens and the media, and the im...