The future is in the hands of the young. In August, we’re celebrating International Youth Day and the ways in which the young enhance our society and culture. The following list is a curated selection featuring titles about the childhood experience in America and abroad. You can get each eBook for just $1.99 through the end of August!
Offer good through August 31, 2021, only available through US retailers.
The Kids Are in Charge
Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children
by Jessica K. Taft
“The Kids Are in Charge is a powerful, provocative, and necessary book. Centering the voices and strategies of the Peruvian movement of working children, Jessica Taft urges us to question assumptions about children—who they are, and who they can be—to imagine childhood otherwise. In engaging and accessible prose, Taft’s analysis of children as critical thinkers and political agents should be required reading not only for scholars of Latin America, but teachers, parents, policy makers and everyone concerned with the complexity of childhood.”—María Elena García, author of Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru
Kids at Work
Latinx Families Selling Food on the Streets of Los Angeles
by Emir Estrada
“This original, thoughtful, engaging ethnography vividly captures the texture of everyday life among immigrant children and children of immigrants who work selling food in the streets of Los Angeles. In the children’s own voices, we learn about their economic contributions, their lives, and aspirations, but also from them about immigrant entrepreneurship, the complex dynamics in immigrant families, and childhood in general. Kids at Work resists facile explanations and makes an enduring contribution to the immigration scholarship. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in immigrant families.”—Cecilia Menjívar, co-author of Immigrant Families
Don’t Use Your Words!
Children’s Emotions in a Networked World
“Juffer values children’s media, demanding that we pay attention to how influential their cultural production is. Including cultural analyses of Blue’s Clues to YouTube, electoral politics to immigration policy, and education to affect theory, Juffer deepens each field as much as she puts them in conversation with each other through careful, deliberate inspection. Her discussions of emotional intelligence, expression, and management are woven alongside her treatment of children’s drawings, art exhibitions, and writings in a way that expands the scope of contemporary media studies. Don’t Use Your Words! is a great accomplishment and a true gift to us all—children, parents, and scholars alike.”—Sara Projansky, author of Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture
“Juffer raises provocative questions concerning children’s emotions… Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.”—Choice
White Kids
Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America
by Margaret A. Hagerman
“By studying how affluent white children think about race, we can see how racist attitudes permeate the structures of power in our society and what it would take to change them… its sobering message should be required reading for all affluent white parents (and affluent white college students)—and especially those who believe in social justice.”—American Journal of Sociology
“Hagerman’s book is a careful, painful and convincing argument that when white people give their children advantages, they are often disadvantaging others. Racism is so hard to overturn, in part, because white people prop it up when they work to make sure their children succeed.”—NBC’s “Think” blog
Girlhood in the Borderlands
Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration
by Lilia Soto
“Lilia Soto brings fresh perspectives to our understanding of transnational migration through the eyes of Mexican teenage girls. Her analysis of their shifting temporal and spatial imaginaries illuminates how neoliberal thinking permeates life in Mexico and the United States.”—Patricia Zavella, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Girlhood in the Borderlands is a compassionate and compelling binational multi-site ethnography. It reveals the hardships and heartaches of lives interrupted, but also the determination and dignity of young women coming of age on both sides of the border. With an attentive ear and a discerning eye, Lilia Soto chronicles how immigration shapes the contours of gender and generation in unexpected ways by requiring young women to develop complex cognitive mappings of time and place, and to make meaning in their lives under conditions they do not control.”—George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place
Growing Up Queer
Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity
by Mary Robertson
“With clarity and rich detail, Robertson tells the story of growing up queer and the community organizations and institutions that buoy today’s LGBT youth. It is a deeply engaging account of both the dignities and indignities of becoming queer, leaving us with a more complicated portrait of youth resilience and risk.”—Amy L. Best, Author of Fast-Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines and Social Ties
“Robertson, rather artfully, nestles her work into the empty space in LGBTQ youth research; how youth become gendered, how they become sexual, and how they come to embrace the identity language that fits them with the most precision. Robertson not only adds to the existing research, but also weaves in and out of it, highlighting its relevance, but also indicates where it proves to be archaic.”—Journal of Youth and Adolescence
Fast-Food Kids
French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties
“In Fast-Food Kids, Amy Best takes us beyond the hype about obesity epidemics and food deserts, vividly bringing us into the world of young people and their food cultures. From the bustling cafeteria, to the local fast food joint, Best shows us how issues of class, race, health and indeed youth culture itself are shaped and shaped by food choices, eating practices and food availability. An important read for those concerned about young people, health and inequality.”—C. J. Pascoe, author of Dude, You’re a Fag
“[Fast-Food Kids] seeks to make apparent the moral dimensions and judgments that attach so readily, and strongly, to the choices that are imagined as being open to us all as we feed ourselves and our families. In these ongoing debatesBests book makes a valuable contribution.”—American Journal of Sociology
Lighting Up
The Rise of Social Smoking on College Campuses
“Why does college-age smoking persist at notable and alarming levels while smoking in the adult US population has significantly declined over the past four decades? Mimi Nichter disentangles and illuminates the lure and social gains of smoking on campus through rich ethnographic accounts. This book helps to unravel the complexity of incentives to smoke among college-age students.”—Linda A. Bennett, author of The Alcoholic Family
“Anthropologist Nichter presents an important new contribution to the literature on youth smoking of interest to both tobacco researchers and general readers.”—Choice
Getting Wasted
Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard
“Vander Ven…leads the reader through a well-researched and comprehensive overview of college drinking…I would urge anyone preparing for college, or preparing another for college, to read this book.”—John S. Wodarski, Contemporary Psychology
“The book offers a realistic portrayal of socially bonding drinking behaviors and attitudes. Vander Ven suggests stellar ways campuses can reduce the harm of excessive drinking.”—Library Journal
Punished
Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
by Victor M. Rios
“With Punished, Rios joins an expanding cadre of social scientists who lament the directions that juvenile justice has taken in the United States in recent decades. He argues that in an era when the Unites States has achieved world-record levels of incarceration, of you people as well as adults, the widespread adoption of severe, hastily adopted get-tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s has gone hand in hand with the vilification and persecution of black and Latino youths.”—Peter Monaghan, The Chronicle Review
“Rios’s book is a valuable contribution to the field because it is an interdisciplinary work that addresses fundamental and ongoing concepts of juvenile delinquency and gang participation.”—Madeleine Novich, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Review
Six Classics of Queer Literature