The lives and aspirations of young Chinese (those between 14 and 26 years old) have been transformed in the past five decades. By examining youth cultures around three historical points - 1968, 1988 ...and 2008 - this book argues that present-day youth culture in China has both international and local roots. Paul Clark describes how the Red Guards and the sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution era carved out a space for themselves, asserting their distinctive identities, despite tight political controls. By the late 1980s, Chinese-style rock music, sports and other recreations began to influence the identities of Chinese youth, and in the twenty-first century, the Internet offers a new, broader space for expressing youthful fandom and frustrations. From the 1960s to the present, this book shows how youth culture has been reworked to serve the needs of the young Chinese.
A captivating time, the 60s and 70s now draw more attention than ever. The first substantial work by historians has appeared only in the last few years, and this volume offers an important ...contribution. These meticulously researched essays offer new perspectives on the Cold War and global relations in the 1960s and 70s through the perspective of the youth movements that shook the U.S., Western Europe, and beyond. These movements led to the transformation of diplomatic relations and domestic political cultures, as well as ideas about democracy and who best understood and promoted it. Bringing together scholars of several countries and many disciplines, this volume also uniquely features the reflections of former activists.
No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply-some would say totally-involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today's young people The ...App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be "app-dependent" versus "app-enabled" and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era.
Gardner and Davis are concerned with three vital areas of adolescent life: identity, intimacy, and imagination. Through innovative research, including interviews of young people, focus groups of those who work with them, and a unique comparison of youthful artistic productions before and after the digital revolution, the authors uncover the drawbacks of apps: they may foreclose a sense of identity, encourage superficial relations with others, and stunt creative imagination. On the other hand, the benefits of apps are equally striking: they can promote a strong sense of identity, allow deep relationships, and stimulate creativity. The challenge is to venture beyond the ways that apps are designed to be used, Gardner and Davis conclude, and they suggest how the power of apps can be a springboard to greater creativity and higher aspirations.
Approximately 2.4 million Black youth participate in after-school programs, which offer a range of support, including academic tutoring, college preparation, political identity development, cultural ...and emotional support, and even a space to develop strategies and tools for organizing and activism. In Reclaiming Community, Bianca Baldridge tells the story of one such community-based program, Educational Excellence (EE), shining a light on both the invaluable role youth workers play in these spaces, and the precarious context in which such programs now exist. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, Baldridge persuasively argues that the story of EE is representative of a much larger and understudied phenomenon. With the spread of neoliberal ideology and its reliance on racism—marked by individualism, market competition, and privatization—these bastions of community support are losing the autonomy that has allowed them to embolden the minds of the youth they serve. Baldridge captures the stories of loss and resistance within this context of immense external political pressure, arguing powerfully for the damage caused when the same structural violence that Black youth experience in school, starts to occur in the places they go to escape it.
InPrecarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of ...precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores inPrecarious Lives.
Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran.Precarious Livesis a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.
Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the ...disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality.Coming of Age in the Other Americashows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation's poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.
Coming of Age in the Other Americailluminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork with 150 young adults, and found that those who had been able to move to better neighborhoods-either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means-achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents. About half the youth surveyed reported being motivated by an "identity project"-or a strong passion such as music, art, or a dream job-to finish school and build a career.
Yet the authors also found troubling evidence that some of the most promising young adults often fell short of their goals and remained mired in poverty. Factors such as neighborhood violence and family trauma put these youth on expedited paths to adulthood, forcing them to shorten or end their schooling and find jobs much earlier than their middle-class counterparts. Weak labor markets and subpar postsecondary educational institutions, including exploitative for-profit trade schools and under-funded community colleges, saddle some young adults with debt and trap them in low-wage jobs. A third of the youth surveyed-particularly those who had not developed identity projects-were neither employed nor in school. To address these barriers to success, the authors recommend initiatives that help transform poor neighborhoods and provide institutional support for the identity projects that motivate youth to stay in school. They propose increased regulation of for-profit schools and increased college resources for low-income high school students.
Coming of Age in the Other Americapresents a sensitive, nuanced account of how a generation of ambitious but underprivileged young Baltimoreans has struggled to succeed. It both challenges long-held myths about inner-city youth and shows how the process of "social reproduction"-where children end up stuck in the same place as their parents-is far from inevitable.
Surfing, punk rock, Dawson's Creek, teen movies, MTV and S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders are among the many popular cultural landmarks examined in American Youth Cultures. It considers themes such as ...race, class, gender, power, sexuality and authority and presents innovative and challenging analyses of texts from the post-war period. Key questions are raised about the significance of youth within American culture.Contributing to the necessary and important debate over the meanings of youth representation within American culture, the ideological nature of youth and its centrality to a complex reading of popular culture are emphasised. In particular the issues of gender, race and sexuality are considered as central to the construction of youth identity and to other significant relationships between youth and authority. The contradictions in youth representation are asserted, denying any easy definitions that might serve to compound stereotypes or sustain vested interests.The authors show how the cultural politics of youth are no longer only about being young but rather associated with both personal and public values, aspirations and ideologies that extend way beyond any simple consideration of the self.Key Features:• The only available book on the subject• Youth is shown to be central to contemporary American culture• Contributors bring a range of approaches to bear on representations of youth in American culture
Is globalization in danger of diluting national identities and 'transnationalizing' cultures? How can societies attempt to manage globalization and become developed while maintaining a viable ...national identity? In this 2007 study of three globalizing states and cities in post-Soviet Eurasia - Russia (Astrakhan), Kazakhstan (Almaty), and Azerbaijan (Baku) - Douglas W. Blum provides an empirical examination of national identity formation, exploring how cultures, particularly youth cultures, have been affected by global forces. Blum argues that social discourse regarding youth cultural trends - coupled with official and non-official approaches to youth policy - complement patterns of state-society relations and modes of response to globalization. His findings show that the nations studied have embraced certain aspects of modernity and liberalism, while rejecting others, but have also reasserted the place of national traditions.
Decades after the massive student protest movements that consumed much of the world, the 1960s remain a significant subject of scholarly inquiry. While important work has been done regarding radical ...activism in the United States and Western Europe, events in what is today known as the Global South-Asia, Africa, and Latin America-have yet to receive the requisite attention they deserve. This volume inserts the Third World into the study of the 1960s by examining the local and international articulations of youth protest in various geographical, social, and cultural arenas. Rejecting the notion that the Third World existed on the periphery, it situates the events of the 1960s in a more inclusive context, building a richer, more nuanced understanding of the Global 1960s that better reflects the dynamism of the period.
