Studies in Childhood and Youth

This edited volume develops critical discussions of prominent methodological approaches in participatory youth research. Chapters give special attention to power issues and dilemmas concerning young people’s and researchers’ involvement in research processes. The collection brings together perspectives of authors from throughout Nordic countries, all with comprehensive experience of qualitative research methods involving young people. 

This book takes a global perspective to address the concept of belonging in youth studies, interrogating its emergence as a reoccurring theme in the literature and elucidating its benefits and shortcomings. While belonging offers new alignments across previously divergent approaches to youth studies, its pervasiveness in the field has led to criticism that it means both everything and nothing and thus requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. The authors do this work to provide an accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses belonging by focusing on transitions, participation, citizenship and mobility to address its theoretical and historical underpinnings and its prevalence in youth policy and research.

This edited volume offers a critical, thorough, and interdisciplinary examination of arguments for eliminating the minimum democratic voting age. As children and youth increasingly assert their political voices on issues such as climate change, gun legislation, Black Lives Matter, and education reform, calls for youth enfranchisement merit further academic conversation. Leading scholars in childhood studies, political science, philosophy, history, law, medicine, and economics come together in this collection to explore the diverse assumptions behind excluding children from voting rights and why these are open to question. While arriving at different and sometimes competing conclusions, each chapter deconstructs the idea of voting as necessarily tied to age while reconstructing a more democratic imagination able to enfranchise the third of humanity made up by children and youth. Thus, this book defines and establishes a new field of academic study and public debate around children'ssuffrage.

This edited volume advances the conceptual framework of the 'everyday urban' to unpack the ways in which processes of modernity in India shape young subjects and, in so doing, centers the analytical categories of childhood and youth. In rejecting simplistic binaries of agency, and teleological logics of development and modernity, the authors focus on the complex pathways of negotiation and conflict that mark the lives of young people across various historical and contemporary contexts in urban India. Chapters are organized across two key themes: Shaping Modern Subjects and Being Modern Subjects, while spanning multiple disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, disability studies, and psychology. Together, the contributions aim to advance the field of childhood and youth studies in South Asia and beyond.

This book sheds light on young New Zealander’s social realities and lived experiences of their digital and sexual lives through an understanding of how they think about and engage with porn. Drawing on qualitative empirical data from interviews with 106 young New Zealanders, each chapter examines young people’s creation of informal norms through an investigation of the broader issues associated with their engagement with porn, namely consent, gender, pleasure and ‘empowerment.’ Following this, the book gives voice to young New Zealander’s perceptions of the value of the sexuality education they receive. Finally, this text argues toward a co-constructed intersectional sexuality education.

This book takes up theoretical and practical discussions of children and young people's participation in public decision-making by taking into account existing literature from throughout childhood studies, sociology of childhood, children's human rights studies, decolonization studies, and intersectionality studies. Through case studies conducted in Brazil, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, Cuevas-Parra provides extensive empirical data from beyond the Global North and confronts dominant views of power, inequalities, and agency. The understanding that children and young people are immersed in intersectional social structures, where they are never 'simply children' but individuals with multiple specific identities, cuts across the book.