On the basis of a national research project undertaken in England, this volume explores how and why young people's engagement is so important globally in education and society, and looks at what teachers and students think about citizenship and community. The authors make recommendations to enhance understanding and the potential for engagement.

Established accounts of the child in nineteenth century literature tend to focus on those who occupy a central position within narratives. This book is concerned with children who are not so easily recognized or remembered, the peripheral or overlooked children to be read in works by Dickens, Bronte, Austen and Rossetti.

Drawing on international case studies, the contributors extrapolate a systematization of the ways in which siblingship is conceived on the basis of shared parentage, shared childhoods, and reciprocal care. They explore what makes these relations worth maintaining and how they contribute to community processes and to material and emotional survival.

This book explores the generational experience of children of immigrants growing up in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, comparing the lives of Mediterranean youths with those from America and Northern Europe.

This collection offers first-hand accounts, research studies and in-depth theoretical explorations of disabled children's childhoods. The accounts oppose the global imposition of problematic views of disability and childhood and instead, offer an open discussion of responsive and ethical research approaches.

Will the future be a climate disaster? Will biotechnologies bring huge improvements to lifespan? Predictions vary, but children's status as human embodiments of the future puts them at the centre of attempts to shape the world and the discipline of childhood studies can therefore make a critical and creative contribution to future-making.

Drawing on children's narratives about their everyday life this book explores how children come to understand the process of socialization at home, at school and in the neighbourhood as an embodied and biographical experience.

This book critically analyzes and theorizes trust dynamics in children's lives and how they impact upon children's participation, citizenship and well-being, drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence that examines trust in various institutional and cultural contexts.

This book is the first comprehensive study of child sexual abuse in the Caribbean, exploring issues such as the ontology of childhood, links between slavery, colonialism and present-day gender-based violence, the impact of child sexual abuse on the brain and child protection after natural disasters.

Children, Film and Literacy explores the role of film in children's lives. The films children engage in provide them with imaginative spaces in which they create, play and perform familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy and everyday narratives and this narrative play is closely connected to identity, literacy and textual practices. Family is key to the encouragement of this social play and, at school, the playground is also an important site for this activity. However, in the literacy classroom, some children encounter a discontinuity between their experiences of narrative at home and those that are valued in school. Through film children develop understandings of the common characteristics of narrative and the particular 'language' of film. This book demonstrates the ways in which children are able to express and develop distinct and complex understandings of narrative, that is to say, where they can draw on their own experiences (including those in a moving image form). Children whose primary experiences of narrative are moving images face particular challenges when their experiences are not given opportunities for expression in the classroom, and this has urgent implications for the teaching of literacy.

This book engages with debates on ethnic minority and Muslim young people showing, beyond apathy and violent political extremism, the diverse forms of political engagement in which young people engage.

This book explores the relationship between children and citizenship, analyzing international perspectives on citizenship and human rights and developing new methods for facilitating the recognition of children as participating agents within society.

Young people are regularly posited as a threat to social order and Deconstructing Youth explores why. Applying Derridean deconstruction to case studies on youth sexuality, violence and developmental neuroscience, Gabriel offers a fresh perspective on how we might attend to 'youth problems' by recasting the foundations of the concept of 'youth'.

Drawing on ethnographic accounts of children's media-referenced play, this book explores children's engagement with media cultures and playground experiences, analyzing a range of issues such as learning, fantasy, communication and identity.

While many worry about population overload, this book highlights the dramatic fall in fertility rates globally exploring questions such as why are parents having fewer babies? Will this lead to population decline? What will be the impact of a world with fewer children and can social policy reverse fertility decline?

Sian Lincoln considers the use, role and significance of private spaces in the lives of young people. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, she explores the place of 'the private' in youth cultural discourses, both historically and contemporarily, that until now have remained largely absent in youth cultural research.

It is now over 20 years since 'open adoption' was first introduced, but it remains a controversial and contested part of social work practice. This innovative and far ranging book sets out to understand why the practice of keeping adopted children in touch with their kinship origins is still so questioned in contemporary adoption work. Written by an experienced practitioner in the field, this book applies, for the first time, Foucauldian methodology to analyze and understand adoption social work, making it essential reading for a wide audience in the social sciences.

This book explores young people's 'nested' and 'political' ecological relationships with crime through an empirical investigation of the important 'places' and 'spaces' in young people's lives; in their social relationships with peers and family members; and within formal institutional systems such as education, youth justice and social care.

This book presents an integral, cross-cultural reflection on the social reality of children's rights and citizenship, giving an insight into new perspectives on the history and different concepts of children's rights in a contextualized and localized manner.

Childhoods at the Intersection of the Local and the Global examines the imposition of the modern Western notion of childhood, which is now deemed as universal, on other cultures and explores how local communities react to these impositions in various ways such as manipulation, outright rejection and acceptance. The book discusses childhoods in different regions of the world and boasts a range of contributors from several academic disciplines such as Sociology, Social Work, Education, Anthropology, Criminology and Human Rights, who are experts on the regions they discuss. The book argues against the notion of a universal childhood and illustrates that different societies around the world have different notions of childhood. This book is recommended reading for students, scholars and practitioners working with children in the Global South as well as internationally.

The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with forty middle-class mothers living in Northern Ireland and the US, this book explores the strategies women adopt, as they take on and creatively re-make motherhood in ways which allow them to cope.

This book sheds light on new research related to welfare state, child care policies, and small children's everyday lives in institutions in Europe. In uniting recent social childhood research, welfare perspectives and historical and comparative approaches, the book explores institutionalization as a feature of the modern child's life.

This book explores the nexus between gender, ageing and culture in dancers practicing a variety of genres. It challenges existing cultural norms which equate ageing with bodily decline and draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to explore alternatives for developing a culturally valued mature subjectivity through the practice of dance.

This book explores the extent to which children engage with questions of morality, arguing that they are active members of society who have both the capacity and understanding to engage with discourses of morality.