A host of international organizations promotes the belief that education will empower Kenya's Maasai girls. Yet the ideas that animate their campaigns often arise from presumptions that reduce the girls themselves to helpless victims of gender-related forms of oppression.

Heather D. Switzer's interviews with over one hundred Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls challenge the widespread view of education as a silver bullet solution to global poverty. In their own voices, the girls offer incisive insights into their commitments, aspirations, and desires. Switzer weaves this ethnographic material into an astute analysis of historical literature, education and development documents, and theoretical literature. Maasai schoolgirls express a particular knowledge about themselves and provocative hopes for their futures. Yet, as Switzer shows, new opportunities force them to face, and navigate, new vulnerabilities and insecurities within a society that is itself in flux.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. "Girls are the most powerful force of change on the planet": Situating Schoolgirlhood Chapter 1. "Now is not like before. The world has changed": Maasai Education in Cultural and Histor Chapter 2. "I see that when I am in school, I will have a good life": Producing and Performing Schoo Chapter 3. "The medicine for fire is fire": Negotiating Schoolgirlhood Chapter 4. "We are not enkanyakuai. . . . We are just girls": Embodying Schoolgirlhood Conclusion. Becoming "People Who Use Both Hands" Notes Works Cited Index | Second runner-up, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, African Studies Association Women's Caucus, 2019
Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award, Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), 2020 — African Studies Association Women's Caucus
Second runner-up, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, African Studies Association Women's Caucus, 2019
Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award, Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), 2020 — Comparative and International Education Society (CIES)
|Heather D. Switzer is an associate professor of women and gender studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University.