Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives ISSN 2049-2162 Volume 9(2020), Issue 1 · pp. 409-413 Paul Scheibelhofer Innsbruck University, Austria paul.scheibelhofer@uibk.ac.at 409 BOOK REVIEWS Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood Marnina Gonnick & Susanne Gannon (Eds.) 2014 256 pages $ 58.95 ISBN 9780889615137 Published by Women’s Press, Toronto Review by Paul Scheibelhofer & Philip Taucher The edited volume “Becoming Girl”, published in 2014 by Marnina Gonick and Susanne Gannon, sets out to further knowledge on young women’s lives and identities through the method of collective biography. The book situates itself in the field of “girlhood studies,” which encompasses scholarship from a range of disciplines such as history, sociology, ethnography or media studies. As a subfield of women’s and gender studies, girlhood studies seeks to elucidate the social realities and discursive production of young women’s lives at the intersection of multiple forms of dominance. It aims to generate knowledge about girls’ life - worlds as well as destabilize taken for granted beliefs about what it means to be “a girl.” Becoming Girl partakes in this academic endeavour by presenting outcomes of collective memory sessions conducted by groups of feminist scholars and students connected to the editors. As Gonick and Gannon state in the introduction, the book is the outcome of a group effort, which shows in the fact that most chapters are written by different combinations of a recurring set of authors. While this lends the book a coherence that edited volumes often lack, it also leads to recurring themes and approaches across the chapters and limits the overall scope of the volume. The books’ eleven chapters are organized in two sections: Four chapters present the methodology of collective biography as conducted by the authors and reflect upon potentials and limitations of this method in the light of post-structuralist thinking. The remaining seven chapters are assembled under the header of “themes” and present analyses of material produced in collective biography sessions. This organization of the book is particularly helpful to readers interested in the method of collective biography but makes it also a worthwhile read for scholars of girlhood.