When she's itty bitty and blond, wearing ribbons and curls and an aura of money, she's adorable and vulnerable, the tiny, innocent heart of our culture. But when the little girl comes from the working class, she's something else. Just what, and why so little is said about it, are the questions Valerie Walkerdine asks in Daddy's Girl, a book about how we see young girls, how they see themselves, and how popular culture mediates the view.

This book sheds new light on the complex inter-relations that make up class, power, local history and space. It turns community thinking on its head by understanding community not as an object but as a relational process with sociality at its core. Based on fieldwork from one market town and the work of Hannah Arendt, it demonstrates how a new approach to social practices can illuminate our understanding of commonality and communal being. Whilst community has become both a much-derided and much-touted term, this thought-provoking work shows that it is at the heart of social process. It will...