Mary Thomas, assistant professor, Department of Geography and Department of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is the author of a new book, Multicultural Girlhood (Temple University Press), an examination of how high school girls perpetuate social spaces of racism, misogyny, and gender stereotyping despite their best intentions.

High school turf wars are often a teenage rite of passage, but there are extremes, as when a race riot at a Los Angeles campus in the spring of 2005 resulted in a police lockdown. Thomas interviewed 26 Latina, Armenian, Filipina, African American, and Anglo girls at that high school to gauge their responses to the campus violence. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2168_reg.html