Youth: Responding to Lives


Book Description

This book draws from various fields of knowledge, in an effort to theorise, create new and innovative conceptual platforms and develop further the hybrid idea of discourses around social inclusion and youth (from policy, practice and research perspectives). Youth: Responding to lives – An international handbook attempts to fill the persistent gap in the problematisation and understanding of inclusion, communalism, citizenship – that are intertwined within the complex youth debate. It writhes and wriggles to highlight the interconnections between the encounters, events and endeavors in young people’s lives. The focus of this edited work is also intended to help us understand how young people shape their development, involvement, and visibility as socio-political actors within their communities. It is this speckled experience of youth that remains one of the most electrifying stages in a community’s lifecycle. Contributors to this text have engaged with notions around identity and change, involvement, social behavior, community cohesion, politics and social activism. The chapters offer an array of critical perspectives on social policies and the broad realm of social inclusion/exclusion and how it affects young people. This book essentially analyses equal opportunities and its allied concepts, including inequality, inequity, disadvantage and diversity that have been studied extensively across all disciplines of social sciences and humanities but now need a youth studies ‘application’.




Contemporary Youth Activism


Book Description

A cutting-edge study showcases the emergence of contemporary youth activism in the United States, its benefits to young people, its role in strengthening society, and its powerful social justice implications. At a time when youth are too often dismissed as either empowered consumers or disempowered deviants, it is vital to understand how these young people are pushing back, challenging such constructions, and advancing new possibilities for their institutions and themselves. This book examines the latest developments in the field of contemporary youth activism (CYA) and documents the myriad ways in which youth activists are effecting social change, even as they experience personal change. By taking public, political action on a range of intersecting issues, youth activists are shifting their own developmental pathways, shaping public policy, and shaking up traditional paradigms. Section one of the book offers a historical perspective on youth activism in the United States, followed by a discussion of contemporary examples of CYA for social justice. The second and third sections analyze the individual, institutional, and ideological effects of CYA, arguing that youth activism works to promote change at three levels: self, systems, and in the broader society. Readers will come away with a clearer understanding of the many ways in which today's youth activists are working to reimagine and remake American democracy, reawakening the promise of a multi-issue, progressive movement for social justice.







The Promise of Adolescence


Book Description

Adolescenceâ€"beginning with the onset of puberty and ending in the mid-20sâ€"is a critical period of development during which key areas of the brain mature and develop. These changes in brain structure, function, and connectivity mark adolescence as a period of opportunity to discover new vistas, to form relationships with peers and adults, and to explore one's developing identity. It is also a period of resilience that can ameliorate childhood setbacks and set the stage for a thriving trajectory over the life course. Because adolescents comprise nearly one-fourth of the entire U.S. population, the nation needs policies and practices that will better leverage these developmental opportunities to harness the promise of adolescenceâ€"rather than focusing myopically on containing its risks. This report examines the neurobiological and socio-behavioral science of adolescent development and outlines how this knowledge can be applied, both to promote adolescent well-being, resilience, and development, and to rectify structural barriers and inequalities in opportunity, enabling all adolescents to flourish.




Everyday Violence in the Lives of Youth


Book Description

Working with Indigenous, queer, immigrant and homeless youth across Canada, this five-year Youth-based Participatory Action Research project used art to explore the many ways that structural violence harms youth, destroying hope, optimism, a sense of belonging and a connection to civil society.




Responding to Troubled Youth


Book Description

Klein consider the quality (and quantity) of response to (and for) status offenders at local community service outlets in seven different cities. By this method, the authors can determine whether such response practices conform with the ideological thrusts embedded in state legislation.




It's Complicated


Book Description

Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.




Responding to Youth Violence Through Youth Work


Book Description

The problem of how to respond to violence involving young people continues to challenge youth workers and policy makers across Europe and the world. In this book, Mike Seal and Pete Harris draw on the findings of a two-year European research project--in which peer researchers spoke to young people--to examine different responses to youth violence. Developing a unique analytical framework that combines elements of critical theory, psychosocial criminology, and applied existential philosophy, the authors present a new model for responding meaningfully and effectively to these issues at personal/psychological, community/cultural, and structural/symbolic levels. Through a series of case studies, Seal and Harris show how these approaches have been applied in different practice settings. Essential reading in the fields of youth and community work, social work, criminology, youth justice, and youth studies, this book will stimulate critical new thinking and encourage reflective and theoretically informed responses to addressing youth violence in practice.




Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives


Book Description

Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives brings together different takes on the possible combinations of agency and structure in the life course, thus rejecting the notion that young individuals are the single masters of their lives, but also the view that their social destinies are completely out of their hands. ‘How did I get here?’ This is a question young people have always asked themselves and is often asked by youth researchers. There is no easy and single answer. The lives that are told, on one hand, and their interpretation, on the other, may have the underlying idea of 'own doing' or the idea of 'social determinism' or, more accurately and frequently, a combination of the two. This collection constitutes a comprehensive map on how to make sense of youth’s biographies and trajectories, it questions and reshapes the discussion on the role and responsibility of youth studies in the understanding of how people juggle opportunities and constraints, and contributes to escaping what Furlong and Cartmel identified as the "epistemological fallacy of late modernity", in which young people find themselves responsible for collective failures or inevitabilities. It can thus interest students, researchers and professors, youth workers and all of those who work for and with young people.




Sticky Faith


Book Description

Sticky Faith delivers positive and practical ideas to nurture within your kids a living, loving faith that lasts a lifetime. Research indicates that almost half of high school seniors drift from their faith after graduation. Struck by this staggering statistic, and recognizing its ramifications, the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) conducted the "College Transition Project" in an effort to identify the relationships and best practices that can set young people on a trajectory of lifelong faith and service. This easy-to-read guide presents both a compelling rationale and a powerful strategy to show parents how to actively encourage their children’s spiritual growth so that it will stick with them into adulthood and empower them to develop a living, lasting faith. Written by Fuller Youth Institute Executive Director Dr. Kara E. Powell and youth expert Chap Clark--authors known for the integrity of their research and the intensity of their passion for young people--Sticky Faith is geared to spark a movement that empowers adults to develop robust and long-term faith in kids of all ages. Further engage your family and church with the Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family, Sticky Faith curriculum, and Sticky Faith youth worker edition. Sticky Faith is also available in Spanish, Cómo criar jóvenes de fe sólida.