Girls are everywhere these days: they rule MTV and the pop charts; they are big box-office draws; they are on the covers of top selling magazines; and they score the winning points in professional sports. Despite the recent flurry of books exploring girlhood, like Odd Girl Out and The Secret Lives of Girls, these titles mainly tackle the topic of aggression in young women. Anita Harris, in her new book Future Girl, goes beyond this to create a realistic portrait of the 'new girl' that has appeared in the twenty first century - she may still play with Barbie, but she is also likely to play...

Unlike as with previous generations, diversity and multiculturalism are engrained in the lives of today's urban youth. Within their culturally diverse urban environments, young people from different backgrounds now routinely encounter one another in their everyday lives and negotiate and contest ways of living together and sharing civic space. What are their strategies for producing, disrupting and living well with difference, how do they create inclusive forms of belonging, and what are the conditions that militate against social cohesion amongst youth? This unique ethnography from education...