Search results

1 – 10 of 36
Book part
Publication date: 8 March 2017

Ana Campos-Holland

Children and youth of color in White and adult-dominated societies confront racism and adultism that shapes their peer cultures. Yet, the “new” sociology of childhood lacks the…

Abstract

Children and youth of color in White and adult-dominated societies confront racism and adultism that shapes their peer cultures. Yet, the “new” sociology of childhood lacks the theory and methodology to explore racialized peer cultures. Thus, this chapter aims to sharpen its research tools. Theoretically, this chapter draws from Technologies of the Self (Foucault, 1988) and Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) to enhance Valentine’s (1997) “adult-youth binary” and Corsaro’s (2015) “interpretive reproduction.” Methodologically, it combines the “doing research with children” approach (Greig, Taylor, & MacKay, 2013) with Critical Race Methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to do research with youth of color. These enhanced research tools are then used to explore how boys and girls of color (n = 150), 9- to 17-year olds, experience peer culture in suburban schools, under police surveillance, and on social media. In the field, interviewers navigated their adult privilege and racial/ethnic positionalities in relation to that of participants and the racial dynamic in the research setting, ultimately aiming to co-create a safe space for counter-storytelling. As a result, this chapter captured how White-dominated peer cultures used racial microaggressions against youth of color in suburban schools, boy peer cultures navigated racialized policing, and online-offline peer cultures curtailed protective and controlling racialized adult surveillance. Theoretically, the racially enhanced interpretive reproduction and adult-youth binary exposed the adultism-racism intersection that shapes youth peer cultures. Methodologically, counter-storytelling revealed the painful realities that youth of color face and that those with adult and/or White privilege would rather ignore.

Details

Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-098-1

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 6 July 2021

Elizabeth W. Corrie

The visibility and impact of young activists is evident in 2020 more than ever, most clearly in the Black Lives Matter movement, but also among climate strikers, water protectors…

Abstract

The visibility and impact of young activists is evident in 2020 more than ever, most clearly in the Black Lives Matter movement, but also among climate strikers, water protectors, March for Our Lives organizers, and even TikTok users and K-pop music fans. The ambivalence with which adults have responded – from pride to dismissal to demonization – has its roots in implicit yet pervasive assumptions about young people stretching back to the early nineteenth century. Through a brief historical sketch, I demonstrate that the contemporary concept of the “American teenager” is the product of a series of social, economic, and political changes in the United States and that this concept undermines youth activism and gives license to adults to dismiss young peoples' justified anger at injustice. This essay contends that adultism, and specifically ephebiphobia – the fear and loathing of young people – dominates today's cultural perceptions of youth in the United States and contributes to policies in education and law enforcement that have domesticated and criminalized young people, undermining their political power. Understanding of the historical factors that shape adults' attitudes toward young peoples' capabilities as activists is a first step to improving and sustaining collaboration between youth and adults in social movements.

Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 4 October 2023

Fiona Morrison

Drawing on key concepts from childhood studies, this chapter provides a theoretical grounding for children's participation rights in research on maltreatment. The chapter…

Abstract

Drawing on key concepts from childhood studies, this chapter provides a theoretical grounding for children's participation rights in research on maltreatment. The chapter discusses the sociology of childhood, tracing how it brought a focus to children's participation in research, and introduces the concepts of adultism and childism to help critique children's participation in research on maltreatment. The chapter is framed by a familiar debate on tensions between children's right to participate and their right to protection. It explores the relevance of these debates for research on child maltreatment. Through its discussion, the chapter explores key issues that have traditionally led to children being kept out of research on child maltreatment. It argues that children's participation is key to advancing knowledge on child maltreatment and fundamentally a way to uphold children's human rights. The concepts introduced in this chapter are threaded and explored throughout the subsequent chapters of the book, in their examination and reflections on children's participation in research on maltreatment.

Details

Participatory Research on Child Maltreatment with Children and Adult Survivors
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-529-3

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 12 January 2021

Karin Gunnarsson Dinker

This paper addresses two main questions: What is taught about animal ethics in primary school and how. Are these messages challenged by the students and, in that case, how and…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper addresses two main questions: What is taught about animal ethics in primary school and how. Are these messages challenged by the students and, in that case, how and why? This is discussed in the light of Critical Animal Pedagogies.

Design/methodology/approach

The findings drawn upon in this paper are from a critical human-animal ethnographic study carried out in three Swedish primary schools between 2012 and 2017 using a case study approach of interviews, observation and intervention.

Findings

This paper suggests that children's subtle ways of resisting and negotiating their own space in the face of adultism, which is the power adults exercise over children, are an ongoing struggle which can both destabilize anthropocentrism and open up space for new pedagogical practice.

Originality/value

This paper explores the implications of and possibilities for teaching and learning given the positions of human children and non-human animals intersect, foremost exploring the agency of children in the school environment.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 41 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 26 July 2016

Ana Campos-Holland, Grace Hall and Gina Pol

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result…

Abstract

Purpose

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result, the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) aims to reevaluate standardized-state testing. Previous research has assessed its impact on schools, educators, and students; yet, youth’s voices are almost absent. Therefore, this qualitative analysis examines how youth of color perceive and experience standardized-state testing.

Design/methodology/approach

Seventy-three youth participated in a semistructured interview during the summer of 2015. The sample consists of 34 girls and 39 boys, 13–18 years of age, of African American, Latino/a, Jamaican American, multiracial/ethnic, and other descent. It includes 6–12th graders who attended 61 inter-district and intra-district schools during the 2014–2015 academic year in a Northeastern metropolitan area in the United States that is undergoing a racial/ethnic integration reform.

Findings

Youth experienced testing overload under conflicting adult authorities and within an academically stratified peer culture on an ever-shifting policy terrain. While the parent-adult authority remained in the periphery, the state-adult authority intrusively interrupted the teacher-student power dynamics and the disempowered teacher-adult authority held youth accountable through the “attentiveness” rhetoric. However, youth’s perspectives and lived experiences varied across grade levels, school modalities, and school-geographical locations.

Originality/value

In this adult-dominated society, the market approach to education reform ultimately placed the burden of teacher and school evaluation on youth. Most importantly, youth received variegated messages from their conflicting adult authorities that threatened their academic journeys.

Details

Education and Youth Today
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-046-6

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 1 May 2019

Jeanie Austin

Possibilities for self-representation for transgender (trans) and gender non-conforming (GNC) youth must be conceptualized in relation to youths’ placement within frames of power…

Abstract

Possibilities for self-representation for transgender (trans) and gender non-conforming (GNC) youth must be conceptualized in relation to youths’ placement within frames of power. Powerful institutional forces in youths’ lives include schools and policing and, as is evidenced by youths’ statements, extend to mass media portrayals. Library approaches that reify the inclusion of representative texts do not adequately meet the needs of trans and GNC youth. As a profession, librarianship must reflect on ideological approaches to gendered embodiment to push against an ongoing repetition of institutional harms done to trans and GNC youth.

This chapter offers examinations of information needs, complex online worlds, and incorporation of histories made invisible by power alongside critical literacy skills as crucial aspects of providing services to all possibly or actually trans and GNC youth. It critically situates the circumstances of trans youths’ lives in relation to the effect that adult perceptions have on trans and GNC youths’ ability to access resources. It provides a framework for reflection on how young adult librarians often unconsciously limit library access by enacting gendered expectations that do not always match the possibility or actuality of youths’ experiences or self-conceptions. The chapter outlines modes of communication – through library materials, programs, community resources and partnerships – that convey deeper understandings of trans and GNC experiences to possibly or actually trans and GNC youth.

Details

LGBTQ+ Librarianship in the 21st Century: Emerging Directions of Advocacy and Community Engagement in Diverse Information Environments
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-474-9

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 4 November 2021

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Mateusz Marecki

In the years 2016–2019, in collaboration with primary school students from Wrocław, Poland, the authors endeavoured to implement participatory methods in children’s literature…

Abstract

In the years 2016–2019, in collaboration with primary school students from Wrocław, Poland, the authors endeavoured to implement participatory methods in children’s literature studies. Their collaborations with these children resulted in the formation of an intergenerational research team and the publication of two peer-reviewed articles co-written with child researchers. As their thinking about child-led research has gravitated towards approaches accentuating the value of co-thinking, they have grown convinced of the potential of participatory research to counterbalance the adultism prevailing in children’s literature studies. Building on the authors’ two participatory projects: ‘Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action’ (Chawar et al., 2018) and ‘Productive Remembering of Polish Childhoods: Child–Adult Memory-Work with the School Literary Canon’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak et al., 2019), this chapter offers a meta-critical reflection on the practical and ethical challenges of working on a research paper co-authored by young collaborators. They focus on issues linked to child–adult co-authorship, such as anonymity concerns, the ethics of representations, time pressures, and institutional challenges. They propose that the key to reassessing the status of child-led research in academia lies in accepting the ‘messiness’ of participatory research, treating it as a constant work in progress rather than a final outcome or product, and shifting away from the more rigid format of academic writing towards a collectivistic and free-flowing narrative.

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 6 July 2021

Abstract

Details

Four Dead in Ohio
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-807-4

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 8 March 2017

Abstract

Details

Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-098-1

Article
Publication date: 20 November 2009

Anna Sparrman

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

1386

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

Findings

The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

Research limitations/implications

The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Originality/value

Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

Details

Young Consumers, vol. 10 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1747-3616

Keywords

1 – 10 of 36