Violent Night Simon Winlow, Steve Hall
2006, 2006-06-01, 20060101
eBook
Why do our night-time cities seem to mix pleasure with violence? This is the time and place when cities are taken over by young men in search of alcohol, drugs, another club or a fight. Current ...public policy has patently failed to keep on top of the new trends in both consumption and destruction which make urban centres simultaneously seductive and dangerous. Violent Night uses powerful insider accounts to uncover the underlying causes and meanings of violence. Interviews with the police, the perpetrators and the victims of violence reveal the complex emotions that surround both the perpetration and resolution of crime. Violent Night shows that a new approach is needed to successfully rehabilitate a culture struggling and failing to deal with nihilism and escalating hostility.
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.
In Latin America, young indigenous people have become visible subjects in ethnic and interethnic encounters. Their engagement with the global world, institutions, technology, religious ideas, and ...politics tells us how indigenous groups adapt, transform, and innovate in relation to wider social and cultural trends, and how resilient modes of thinking and practices are. We need to consider their transition to adulthood as a core dimension of personhood. Equally, if we are to understand young people, we must know how they shape their values, actions, and identity. So how do Amazonian native young people perceive, question and/or negotiate the new kinds of social and cultural situations in which they find themselves? Virtanen looks at how current power relations constituted by ethnic recognition, new social contacts, and cooperation with different institutions have shaped the current native youth in Amazonia. Using detailed ethnographic account of the Manchineri community, the study examines at indigenous youths' new transition to adulthood, their responsibilities, and experiences related to, for instance, urbanization, and global youth cultures.
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.
The Second Edition of Preventing and Reducing Juvenile Delinquency: A Comprehensive Framework aims to inform students about the latest research and the most promising and effective programs and ...provides a wealth of information for understanding, preventing and controlling juvenile delinquency.
Hope Is Cut Mains, Daniel
11/2011, Volume:
13
eBook
How do ambitious young men grapple with an unemployment rate in urban Ethiopia hovering around fifty percent? Urban, educated, and unemployed young men have been the primary force behind the recent ...unrest and revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East. Daniel Mains' detailed and moving ethnographic study,Hope is Cut, examines young men's struggles to retain hope for the future in the midst of economic uncertainty and cultural globalization.
Through a close ethnographic examination of young men's day-to-day livesHope is Cutexplores the construction of optimism through activities like formal schooling, the consumption of international films, and the use of khat, a mild stimulant.
Mains also provides a consideration of social theories concerning space, time, and capitalism. Young men here experience unemployment as a problem of time-they often congregate on street corners, joking that the only change in their lives is the sun rising and setting. Mains addresses these factors and the importance of reciprocity and international migration as a means of overcoming the barriers to attaining aspirations.
