Professor Shauna Pomerantz

Profile

I am a critical sociologist and youth cultural theorist who studies how young people, social media, creative practices, and families interconnect to affect each other. My teen daughter and I have co-researched the importance of TikTok in her life. In so doing, we challenged the adult/child binary that suggests children's knowledge and experience is less valuable than that of adults. I have written articles and book chapters on girls' cultural practices and representations of girlhood. I am also the author of Girls, Style, and School Identities: Dressing the Part (Palgrave, 2008), co-author, with Dawn Currie and Deirdre Kelly, of Girl Power: Girls Reinventing Girlhoods (Peter Lang, 2009), and co-author, with Rebecca Raby, of Smart Girls: Success, School, and the Myth of Post-Feminism (University of California Press, 2017).

Research

Publications

Books:

Pomerantz, S. and Raby, R. (2017). Smart girls: Success, school, and the myth of post-feminism. University of California Press.

Currie, D. H., Kelly, D. M., & Pomerantz, S. (2009). ‘Girl power’: Girls reinventing girlhood. Peter Lang.

Pomerantz, S. (2008). Girls, style, and school identities: Dressing the part. Palgrave Macmillan.

Selected book chapters:

Pomerantz, S. & Field, M. (2022). Watching TikTok, feeling feminism: Intergenerational flows of feminist knowledge. In T. Boffone (Ed.), TikTok cultures in the United States. Routledge.

Pomerantz, S. & Field, M. (2021). A TikTok assemblage: Girlhood, radical media engagement, and parent-child generativity. In F. Blaikie (Ed.), Visual and cultural identity constructs of global youth: Situated, embodied and performed ways of being, engaging and belonging (pp. 139-157). Routledge.

Pomerantz, S. (2020). Girlhood studies. In D.T. Cook, The SAGE encyclopedia of children and childhood studies (pp. 847-851) SAGE. [3300 words]

Raby, R. & Pomerantz, S. (2018). Dress codes as gender politics: Feminist action in Canadian high schools. In X. Chen, R. Raby, & P. Albanese (Eds.), The sociology of childhood and youth studies in Canada: Categories, inequalities, engagement (pp. 293-313). Canadian Scholar’s Press.

Selected articles:

Pomerantz, S. (forthcoming). A TikTok education: Post qualitative transformations of the adult-child hierarchy. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Pomerantz, S. (2021). Immanent cinematic girlhoods: The ordinary affects in/of Eighth Grade. Feminist Media Studies, online first.

Al-Jbouri, E. & Pomerantz, S. (2020). A new kind of monster, cowboy, and crusader? Gender hegemony and flows of masculinities in Pixar animated films. Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13(1), 43-63.

Pomerantz, S. & Raby, R. (2020). Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success: Posthuman performativity and smart girlhood. Gender & Education 32(8), 983-1000.

Bablak, L., Raby, R., & Pomerantz, S. (2016). “I don’t want to stereotype, but it’s true”: Maintaining whiteness at the center through the ‘smart Asian’ stereotype in high school, Whiteness & Education 1(1), 54-68.

Raby, R. & Pomerantz, S. (2015). Playing it down/playing it up: Girls strategic negotiations of academic success. British Journal of Sociology of Education 36(4), 507-525. [Lead article]

Pomerantz, S., Raby, R. & Stefanik, A. (2013). Girls run the world? Caught between sexism and postfeminism in the school. Gender & Society 27(2), 185-207.

Pomerantz, S. & Raby, R. (2011). “Oh, she’s so smart”: Girls’ complex engagements with post/feminist narratives of academic success. Gender and Education 23(5), 549-564.

Expertise