In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical threat that young men and women posed to postwar stability. As Martin Kalb shows in this fascinating study, constructs like the rowdy young boy and the sexually deviant girl served as proxies for the diffuse fears of adult society, while allowing authorities ranging from local institutions to the U.S. military government to strengthen forms of social control.
"Much hand-wringing has occurred over the so-called failure of young people to grow up today. This volume persuasively shows the range of forces that shape the protracted transition to adulthood. An excellent and enjoyable read." --Deborah Carr, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University, and editor of the Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development. "The essays in this volume are written with great verve and intelligence, grounded in extensive fieldwork and careful data analysis." --Frank Furstenberg, Professor of Sociology in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania
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 America shows 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 America illuminates 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 America presents 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.
Coming of Age at the End of Nature explores a new kind of environmental writing. This powerful anthology gathers the passionate voices of young writers who have grown up in an environmentally damaged and compromised world. Each contributor has come of age since Bill McKibben foretold the doom of humanity’s ancient relationship with a pristine earth in his prescient 1988 warning of climate change, The End of Nature. What happens to individuals and societies when their most fundamental cultural, historical, and ecological bonds weaken—or snap? In Coming of Age at the End of Nature, insightful millennials express their anger and love, dreams and fears, and sources of resilience for living and thriving on our shifting planet. Twenty-two essays explore wide-ranging themes that are paramount to young generations but that resonate with everyone, including redefining materialism and environmental justice, assessing the risk and promise of technology, and celebrating place anywhere from a wild Atlantic island to the Arizona desert, to Baltimore and Bangkok. The contributors speak with authority on problems facing us all, whether railing against the errors of past generations, reveling in their own adaptability, or insisting on a collective responsibility to do better. Contributors include Blair Braverman, Jason Brown, Cameron Conaway, Elizabeth Cooke, Amy Coplen, Ben Cromwell, Sierra Dickey, Ben Goldfarb, CJ Goulding, Bonnie Frye Hemphill, Lisa Hupp, Amaris Ketcham, Megan Kimble, Craig Maier, Abby McBride, Lauren McCrady, James Orbesen, Alycia Parnell, Emily Schosid, Danna Staaf, William Thomas, and Amelia Urry.
Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the “storm and stress” period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey’s end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imagination and neglected as an area of sociological investigation, something that has been noted by sociologists over the last four decades. Going beyond the overwhelmingly psychological literature, this book draws on original qualitative research and theories of social recognition and thus presents a first step towards filling an important gap in our understanding of the meaning of adulthood.
To present these thoughtfully crafted case studies of undergraduate culture, the author did what anthropologists usually do in more distant cultures: he lived among the natives. His findings are sometimes disturbing, potentially controversial, but somehow very believable. This text presents a vivid slice of life of what the author saw and heard in the dorms of a typical state university, Rutgers, in the 1980s.
Following in the footsteps of the highly successful Coming of Age in America and Coming of Age Around the World, this new anthology of fiction and memoir explores coming of age in the new millennium. Twenty-one stories by noted authors including Sherman Alexie, Mary F. Chen, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Seth Kantner, and ZZ Packer explore the trials and tribulations of growing up in our increasingly fragmented world. Issues of identity, sexuality, solitude, and conflict are beautifully presented through the voices of writers of all ages and ethnicities, from Lan Samantha Chang tackling absent or dead parents in “The Eve of the Spirit Festival” to Emily Rabateau addressing race in “Mrs. Turner’s Lawn Jockeys.” With a preface and introductions to each piece by Mary Frosch providing cultural context, this collection is a stunning literary tribute to a new generation of global citizens that provides a distinctively American sense of hope.
Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel presents an extraordinary documentary of the 20th century, captured with a haunting voice and cadence that only he could achieve. Wise, contemplative, and wondrous, Coming of Age is Terkel in high form--compassionate, generous, always insightful--"(a) kind of national prose poem, a chorus of cacophonous voices offering a jagged, emotionally charged portrait of our times" (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review).
Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. At the time of its initial publication in 2008, Coming of Age in Second Life was the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group. Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself. Now with a new preface in which the author places his book in light of the most recent transformations in online culture, Coming of Age in Second Life remains the classic ethnography of virtual worlds.
