Join us for an engaging book launch on Monday, July 7, from 16:15 to 17:45 (in person) at Freie Universität Berlin, Holzlaube, Raum 2.2059, Fabeckstraße 23-25, 14195 Berlin.

Convened by Sebastian Conrad, Michael Goebel, and Isabella Löhr, the session promises stimulating discussions in an academic setting.

Join us for an engaging book launch on Girl Power? A History of Girl-Focused Development from Nairobi, by Sarah Bellows-Blakely, with a book presentation and Q&A session. The event will include a comment from Abosede George (Columbia University/Barnard College). A reception with food and drinks will follow.

Everyone is welcome to attend—this is an open event meant to bring together various parts of the Berlin community to discuss how, when, and why austerity capitalism and feminism became intertwined, and to celebrate the launch of this book.

About the book:

How did girl-focused development planning become widespread, both within the United Nations and in global policymaking? How did "neoliberal" capitalism become wedded to mainstream feminism through "girl power" development frameworks? These are the central questions addressed in the book, Girl Power? A History of Girl-Focused Development from Nairobi (Chicago University Press, 2025). In the 1980s and 1990s, members of a Pan-African NGO called the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) worked with staff at UNICEF to invent and popularize girl-focused development programming. Yet their alliance was anything but easy. Within the FEMNET-UNICEF network, ideas about girls and development were hotly contested. Some people promoted girl power as a way to demand top-down changes to the global economic system. Others used girl power to justify the existing economic order; they called for girls to pull themselves and their communities up by their proverbial bootstraps under enduring conditions of economic austerity. Across all formulations, African girls and their imagined status became the battlefield on which capacious fights about the causes and solutions to capitalism, poverty, inequality, and patriarchy were waged. The talk methodologically explores the need to trace not only which ideas and policy frameworks became adopted, but which ones were erased, forgotten, cast aside, or unadopted and why as girl power grew into a globally dominant set of development frameworks.

Sarah Bellows-Blakely is a junior research group leader in gender studies and lecturer in global history at Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her undergraduate and graduate training at Stanford University and Washington University in St. Louis. In 2017, she moved to Berlin, where she became a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humboldt University’s Institute for Asian and African Studies. She has been at Freie Universität since 2018, first as a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School for Global Intellectual History and, since last year, as the leader of a Berlin University Alliance-funded junior research group in the history of science. She teaches in the MA Program for Global History. Bellows-Blakely’s research sits at the intersections of global history,  gender studies, and intellectual history. Her publications have appeared in the American Historical Review, Gender & History, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for African History, among other places. 

Abosede George is the director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University and Associate Professor in the departments of History and Africana studies at Barnard College and Columbia. Her areas of specialization include West African history, most specifically the History of Lagos, the history of Youth and Childhood, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Urban History, and Migration History. She earned her BA in History and Political Science at Rutgers University (1998), her MA in history at Stanford University (2002), and her PhD also in History at Stanford University. Prior to joining Barnard College, Dr. George was Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

The book launch is a joint event with the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies and the Berlin University Alliance-funded junior research group "Fixing the System: Analyses in the Context of the History of Science".

We look forward to seeing you there!

Please see our Code of Conduct that applies to all Global History Events: