Drawing upon qualitative material from parents and professionals, including ethnography, narrative inquiry, interviews and focus groups, this book brings together feminist and critical disability studies theories.

This book examines the lives and repartnering behaviour of former spouses and co-habitees, groups pivotal to recent marital change. Focusing on contemporary Britain, it examines these people's experiences of being single, their orientations towards past and new relationships, and their self-identities in the context of a couple-orientated society.

This research project offers a new perspective on post-sixteen transitions. Combing secondary data with narrative accounts it describes how young people in the UK make choices at the end of their compulsory schooling and provides a dynamic model of decision-making and a thorough critique of current research in the area, beyond fashionable concepts.

Detailing the development of a new Western attitude to children and their place in society, this book tells the story of Italy's forgotten children at the end of the nineteenth century - foundlings, street children, factory and mine workers, emigrants and delinquents - and illustrates the efforts of the recently unified Italian state to help them.

For years we have known that teenagers' peers influence their substance use. This book tells you how. It is not a simple explanation: it is based on the teenagers' own selection of peers, peer influence, the formation of social networks and the patterning of their peer ties. All of which can result in chain reactions in teenagers' substance use.

Using an innovative, action research approach, Vickers explores the lives of women who work full time while caring for a child with significant chronic illness or disability. She demonstrates that such women can be disconnected from those around them, unsupported and overwhelmed with responsibility at home and work.

Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticistexperience of rapture. Ohi examines the power of the work of art to transport, to disorient, to move, to extort the equivocal pleasuresof self-loss. He also explores how the beautiful child offers partisans of 'art for art's sake' an emblem for the ecstatic and erotic, even the queer possibilities of art. Aestheticism's erotic child is thus in stark contrast to the innocent child of today's ideology, who secures the claims of identity against the very disorientations celebrated by aestheticism. Articulating aesthetic transport through the desiring and desired child, aestheticism interrogates the ideology underpinning sexual oppression.

Educating young people about sex and sexuality remains one of the most controversial and political areas of the school curriculum. Drawing on young people's own understandings of their sexual selves, knowledge and practices Sexual Subjects considers the implications for how we conceptualize the effectiveness of sexuality education. Reshaping thinking around youthful (hetero)sexualities Sexual Subjects challenges current approaches to teaching about sex and sexuality.

In this timely study, high profile researchers contribute to the burgeoning field of the social studies of childhood with original and often surprising perspectives and approaches. They demonstrate that far from being esoteric or negligible, childhood is part and parcel of the social fabric in both poor and affluent countries. With chapters on children's agency in small worlds and childhood's placement in large scale relationships, the book shows not only the variety of childhood(s), but also suggests that much is common in a generational context.

Written in a clear and accessible style, this book presents a broad ranging enquiry into various methodological issues associated with contemporary youth research. Chapters cover a variety of topical areas, including youth transitions, youth in care, drugs, consumption and music. Featuring studies by new and established youth researchers, this book will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and also those carrying out more advanced research, in the fields of sociology, social policy, health studies, cultural and media studies.

This book analyzes the nature and experience of childhoods around the world at the beginning of the 21st century. Wide-ranging developments concerning children in the fields of social policy, sociology and politics have spurred significant growth in the social study of childhood. The book, which is primarily designed for students, academics and practitioners who need to keep up with fast-moving contemporary developments, considers childhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Friendship and Educational Choice provides a unique insight into how young people go about making decisions about their educational options and the subtle, yet crucial, influence of friends and peers on these processes. It argues that focusing on both the impact of friends on educational decisions and the reciprocal influences that such decisions may exert on young people's friendships helps us to understand the significance and impact of educational choice in the wider lives of young people.

Much concern has been expressed about the scandal of physical and sexual abuse by care workers of children living in residential homes but this is the first detailed study of the major problem of violence between children . Based on extensive interviews with young people as well as staff, children's own perspectives and experiences of violence are highlighted. There is important new information about different levels of violence between homes, the significance of gender and group hierarchies, and strategies to tackle violence.

This collection of essays represents some of the most important recent research into changing patterns of family, household and community life. It brings together some of the leading sociologists in the field to explore how these informal social relationships change over time and the life course. It will be essential reading on courses concerned with the family and youth sociology.

Provides insights into a lively field of international human rights politics - the protection of children and their rights - by looking at the negotiations leading to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

An incendiary examination of burnout - what got us here, the pressures that sustain it and the need for drastic change Are you tired, stressed and trying your best but somehow it's never enough? Does your job seep into your evenings and your home life creep into your work? Does the bottom half of your To Do list feel unreachable? This is burnout and it is affecting how we work, parent, socialise and live. Through her own experience, original interviews and detailed analysis, Anne Helen Petersen traces the institutional and generational causes of burnout. And, in doing so, she helps us to let go of our guilt and imagine a possible future. 'Genuinely enlightening... Can't Even is a reminder to the burned out generation that things can be different' Observer

The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions, beliefs, and influencing factors that may lead to different fertility outcomes among young women in Nicaragua, a country with one of the highest adolescent fertility rates in Latin America. The results are based on qualitative data collected in urban areas. Miriam Muller reveals that two structural constraints affect women's choices and their capacity to actively participate in defining their life paths: poverty and traditional gender norms.This book contributes to the discussion of intergenerational transmission of poverty by disentangling the mechanisms behind decision-making around teenage motherhood and by describing the consequences of these decisions.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews from across Colombia-including former child guerillas, former hostages of the guerilla organization, mothers of child soldiers, and humanitarian aid workers- this volume explores the experiences of children involved with the Colombian guerilla group the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc). Going beyond the predominant humanitarian perspectives on child soldiers, Johanna Higgs delves into the specific social and cultural aspects of the Colombian conflict to give a contextualized, culturally relevant understanding of the processes of both militarization and demobilization of children, deploying the theoretical lens of "lifeworlds." In so doing, Higgs not only provides insight into children's involvement in conflict in Colombia, but presents a clear case for a move away from homogenized understandings of "child soldiers," thus far dominated by viewpoints from industrialized Western nations. Tying together perspectives from anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, and international development, Higgs provides not only a much-needed examination of how children are militarized, soldiering in the Farc context, and demilitarization, but also a blueprint for how research can be tied to specific cultural contexts.

This collection is an engaging exploration of how Bourdieu's key concepts - field, habitus and capital - help us re-think the status of childhood. The authors are committed to improving the social status and well-being of childhood in social, economic and political worlds that too often fail to accord children respect for their human rights.

The behaviour and safety of children and young people in and around schools is a topic of world-wide concern. From school shootings and deaths on school premises to the everyday behaviour of young people in school, this book explores what is happening in schools in Britain and links it with evidence from elsewhere in the world.

In der Ausgabe dieses Jahrbuchs stehen Themen im Fokus, die in der internationalen Jugendforschung, aber auch in der deutschsprachigen empirischen Bildungsforschung, zunehmend an Prasenz und Aktualitat gewinnen. Internationale Autoren und Autorinnen beleuchten das Zusammenwirken von emotionalen und sozialen Aspekten im schulischen Lehr/Lernprozess. Zudem gibt dieser Band deutliche Impulse, fur die in der deutschsprachigen Jugendforschung uberraschend wenig prominenten Studien zur Bedeutung der Peers.

Wie sehen Bedingungen des Aufwachsens und Bildungschancen von Kindern und Jugendlichen in muslimisch gepragten Kontexten aus? Theoretische Diskurse und empirische Befunde einer Tagung, die erstmals einen dezidiert internationalen und interdisziplinaren wissenschaftlichen Austausch ermoeglicht hat, werden in diesem Band der Reihe 'Kinder, Kindheiten, Kindheitsforschung' vorgelegt. Die Bedeutung von Religion, Armut und Gewalt, Erziehung und Bildung in unterschiedlichen muslimisch gepragten Lebenswelten wird ebenso thematisiert wie auch verschiedene padagogische Institutionen, Generationenlagen und das Geschlechterverhaltnis in der Turkei, AEgypten, Israel oder im Libanon, aber auch in postsowjetischen Staaten.

Der vorliegende Band reflektiert das Thema "Bildung und Wissensgesellschaft," das durch die PISA-Studie, die Diskussion uber die Zukunft unseres rohstoffarmen Landes und die nicht zuletzt kulturell konfigurierten weltpolitischen Spannungen Aktualitat und Bedeutung erlangte, auf eine umfassende und interdisziplinare Weise.

Leitfragen sind dabei: Was heisst "Bildung"? Wodurch wurde unser Begriff von Bildung gepragt? Was sind die unentbehrlichen Komponenten unserer Vorstellung von Bildung? Welche Modifikationen des uberkommenen Bildungsbegriffs sind notig? Welche praktischen Massnahmen zur Sicherung wie zur Modifikation unserer Bildung sind angezeigt?

Was bedeutet demgegenuber der in jungster Zeit zu beobachtende Aufstieg des Begriffs "Wissensgesellschaft"? Sind wir tatsachlich in eine neue, wissensdominierte Epoche gesellschaftlicher Selbstorganisation eingetreten? Reproduzieren sich Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft heute anders als fruher? Welche speziellen Arten von Wissen und Wissensvermittlung werden dafur gebraucht? Wie verhalt sich dieses "Wissen" zur "Bildung"? "

Im Lebensalltag entwerfen Manner ihre Rollen im Spannungsfeld von gesellschaftlichen Anspruchen und realen Moeglichkeiten ihrer Lebenswelt. Tradierte oder medial vermittelte "gemachte" Mannerbilder liefern dafur Bausteine und Konstruktionsmodelle. Doch was aussieht wie ein schlussiger Bauplan, erweist sich oft auch fur den erfahrenen Heimwerker als unsicher, widerspruchlich oder gar unvereinbar. Bildung und Beratung stellen sich der Aufgabe, wie man gut fundierte Bewaltigungsstrategien und tragfahige Loesungen erarbeiten kann. Konkrete Herausforderungen und Problemstellungen des Alltages und seiner gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen sind Gegenstand der "Baustelle Mann".