Inventing Adulthoods


Book Description

This text is written through case studies and interviews.




Inventing Ourselves


Book Description

A tour through the groundbreaking science behind the enigmatic, but crucial, brain developments of adolescence and how those translate into teenage behavior The brain creates every feeling, emotion, and desire we experience, and stores every one of our memories. And yet, until very recently, scientists believed our brains were fully developed from childhood on. Now, thanks to imaging technology that enables us to look inside the living human brain at all ages, we know that this isn't so. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, one of the world's leading researchers into adolescent neurology, explains precisely what is going on in the complex and fascinating brains of teenagers--namely that the brain goes on developing and changing right through adolescence--with profound implications for the adults these young people will become. Drawing from cutting-edge research, including her own, Blakemore shows: How an adolescent brain differs from those of children and adults Why problem-free kids can turn into challenging teens What drives the excessive risk-taking and all-consuming relationships common among teenagers And why many mental illnesses--depression, addiction, schizophrenia--present during these formative years Blakemore's discoveries have transformed our understanding of the teenage mind, with consequences for law, education policy and practice, and, most of all, parents.




Understanding Research with Children and Young People


Book Description

How do views about children shape research concerned with their lives? What different forms can research with children take? What ethical issues does it involve? How does it impact on policy and practice, and on the lives of children themselves? This book helps you to understand how research is designed and carried out to explore questions about the lives of children and young people. It tackles the methodological, practical and ethical challenges involved, and features examples of actual research that illustrate: Different strategies for carrying out research Common challenges that arise in the research process Varying modes of engagement that researchers can adopt with participants and audiences; and The impact that research can have on future studies, policy and practice.




Elusive Adulthoods


Book Description

Essays on the changing meanings of adulthood in places around the world: “An important collection that furthers anthropological work on life stages.” —Susan Reynolds Whyte, author of Generations in Africa: Connections and Conflicts Elusive Adulthoods examines why, in recent years, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard in societies around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of “What is adulthood?” and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.




Routledge Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood


Book Description

The second and completely revised edition of the Routledge Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood draws on the work of leading academics from four continents in order to introduce up-to-date perspectives on a wide range of issues that affect and shape youth and young adulthood. It provides a multi-disciplinary overview of a dynamic field of study that offers unique insights on social change in advanced societies. It is aimed at researchers, policy-makers and advanced students on a global level. The Handbook introduces the main theoretical perspectives used within youth studies and sets out future research agendas. Each of the ten sections covers an important area of research – from education and the labour market to youth cultures, health and crime – discussing change and continuity in the lives of young people, introducing readers to some of the most important work in the field, while highlighting the underlying perspectives that have been used to understand the complexity of modern youth and young adulthood.




Researching Everyday Childhoods


Book Description

How can we know about children's everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children's everyday lives with discussions of key theoretical and methodological concepts to provide a unique guide to researching childhood and youth. Researching Everyday Childhoods begins by asking what recent 'post-empirical' and 'post-digital' frameworks can offer researchers of children and young people's lives, particularly in researching and theorising how the digital remakes childhood and youth. The key ideas of time, technology and documentation are then introduced and are woven throughout the book's chapters. Research-led, the book is informed by two state of the art empirical studies – 'Face 2 Face' and 'Curating Childhoods' – and links to a dynamic multimedia archive generated by the studies.




Young People, Social Capital and Ethnic Identity


Book Description

Social capital and ethnicity are crucial to young people’s understandings of their social world. The strong bonding networks often assumed in ethnic groups suggest that individuals may prefer to be bonded to each other according to shared socio-cultural factors such as shared histories, memories, language, customs, traditions and values. However, bridging forms of social capital allow new understandings of ethnic identities to emerge, and which involve dynamic and complex social processes that are continually changing and evolving according to time, location and context. This book explores the ways in which the concepts of social capital and ethnicity play a central role in young people’s relationships, participation in wider social networks and the construction of identities. Researchers and scholars working in the fields of children and youth studies, education, families, social and racial and ethnic studies, offer differing accounts of the ways in which social capital operates in young people’s lives across diverse social settings and ethnic groups. This edited book is timely and significant given the public interest of researchers, academics, politicians and policymakers working in areas of youth and community work, race relations and cultural diversity. This book was published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.




Debating Emerging Adulthood


Book Description

The transition from adolescence to adulthood has undergone significant changes in recent decades. Unlike a half century ago, when young people in industrialized countries moved from adolescence into young adulthood in relatively short order at around age 20, now the decade from the late teens to the late twenties is seen as an extended time of self-focused exploration and education in pursuit of optimally fulfilling relationships and careers. Recognition of this new period is stronger than ever, but an important question remains: should emerging adulthood be considered a developmental stage, or a process?In Debating Emerging Adulthood: Stage or Process? two pairs of developmental psychologists take sides in a debate that is central to the very concept of emerging adulthood. Arnett and Tanner argue that as young people around the world share demographic similarities, such as longer education and later marriage, the years between the ages 18 and 25 are best understood as entailing a new life stage. However, because the experiences of emerging adults worldwide vary according to cultural context, educational attainment, and social class, these two scholars suggest that there may not be one but many different emerging adulthoods. An important issue for this burgeoning area of inquiry is to explore and describe this variation. In contrast, Hendry and Kloep assert that stage theories have never been able to explain individual transitions across the life course; in their view, stage theories-including the theory of emerging adulthood-ought to be abolished altogether, and explanations found for the processes and mechanisms that govern human change at any age. This engaging book maps out the argument of "stage or process" in detail, with vigorous disagreements, conflicting alternatives, and some leavening humor, ultimately even finding some common ground. Debating Emerging Adulthood is an absolute must-read for developmental psychologists as well as anyone interested in this indisputably important time of life.




The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Inequalities and the Life Course


Book Description

Drawing upon perspectives from across the globe and employing an interdisciplinary life course approach, this handbook explores the production and reproduction of different types of inequality across a variety of social contexts. Inequalities are not static, easily measurable, and essentially quantifiable circumstances of life. They are processes which impact on individuals throughout the life course, interacting with each other, accumulating, attenuating, reproducing, or distorting themselves along the way. The chapters in this handbook examine various types of inequality, such as economic, gender, racial, and ethnic inequalities, and analyse how these inequalities manifest themselves within different aspects of society, including health, education, and the family, at multiple levels and dimensions. The handbook also tackles the global COVID-19 pandemic and its striking impact on the production and intensification of inequalities. The interdisciplinary life course approach utilised in this handbook combines quantitative and qualitative methods to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer strategies and principles for identifying and tackling issues of inequality. This book will be indispensable for students and researchers as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding and eradicating the processes of production, reproduction, and perpetuation of inequalities.




Meeting the Transitional Needs of Young Adult Learners


Book Description

This is the first New Directions volume related to young adult learners since 1984. Then, as now, young adults are an important segment of the adult population but have received scant attention in the adult education literature. Increasingly, youths and young adults are enrolling in adult education programs and in doing so are changing the meaning of adulthood. Given the significant demographic, technological, and cultural shifts during the past 30 years, there is an increasing need for practitioners and program planners to reconsider what constitutes “adult” and “adult education.” An understanding of the changing meaning of adulthood is fundamental to developing programs and policies that will address the needs of younger learners, and we believe it is time for an updated discussion among adult educators and scholars in other disciplines. This sourcebook is designed to reignite the discussion related to meeting the educational needs of young adults along with a timely and interdisciplinary discussion that highlights the transitional needs of young adult learners. This is the 143rd volume of the Jossey Bass series New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Noted for its depth of coverage, it explores issues of common interest to instructors, administrators, counselors, and policymakers in a broad range of education settings, such as colleges and universities, extension programs, businesses, libraries, and museums.