This volume offers a critical rethinking of the construct of youth wellbeing, stepping back from taken-for-granted and psychologically inflected understandings. Wellbeing has become a catchphrase in educational, health and social care policies internationally, informing a range of school programs and social interventions and increasingly shaping everyday understandings of young people. Drawing on research by established and emerging scholars in Australia, Singapore and the UK, the book critically examines the myriad effects of dominant discourses of wellbeing on the one hand, and the social and cultural dimensions of wellbeing on the other. From diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, it explores how notions of wellbeing have been mobilized across time and space, in and out of school contexts, and the different inflections and effects of wellbeing discourses are having in education, transnationally and comparatively. The book offers researchers as well as practitioners new perspectives on current approaches to student wellbeing in schools and novel ways of thinking about the wellbeing of young people beyond educational settings.

This book discusses how human wellbeing is constructed and transferred intergenerationally in the context of international migration. Research on intergenerational transmission (IGT) has tended to focus on material asset transfers prompting calls to balance material asset analysis with that of psychosocial assets - including norms, values attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on empirical research undertaken with Latin American migrants in London, Katie Wright sets out to redress the balance by examining how far psychosocial transfers may be used as a buffer to mediate the material deprivations that migrants face via adoption of a gender, life course and human wellbeing perspective.

Katie Wright explores how human wellbeing is constructed and how it 'travels' across spatial boundaries. She draws on empirical research, undertaken with Peruvian migrants based in London and Madrid and their Peru-based relatives and close friends to explore how human wellbeing is constructed and how it 'travels' transnationally.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013- 17) was one of the largest public inquiries in Australian history and one of the most important investigations into child abuse internationally. It facilitated a national conversation about justice for victims and survivors and how to improve child safety in the future. Through the examination of practices in key social institutions, including churches, schools, sporting clubs, hospitals and voluntary organisations, it provided new understandings of the widespread abuse that many people had experienced in the past and it made recommendations for a national redress scheme. The Royal Commission also recommended sweeping reforms in policies, practices and institutional cultures. Offering valuable insights into the Royal Commission's history and background, its social and cultural significance, and its implications for policy development and legislative reform, this book provides a wide-ranging analysis of the work of the Royal Commission and its social, psychological, legal and discursive impact. The chapters reveal not only the complexity of the matters that the Royal Commission was dealing with and the difficulties faced by the victims of child sexual abuse, but also the challenges of researching and writing about this sensitive topic. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies.

This book provides an alternative perspective on community resilience, drawing on critical sociological and social policy insights about how people individually and collectively cope with different kinds of adversity. Based on the idea that resilience is more than simply an invention of neoliberal governments, this book explores diverse expressions of resilience and considers what supports and undermines people's resilience in different contexts. Focusing on the United Kingdom, it examines the contradictions and limitations of neoliberal resilience policies and the role of policy in shaping how vulnerabilities are distributed and how resilience is manifested. The book explores different types of resilience including planning, response, recovery, adaptation and transformation, which are examined in relation to different types of threat such as financial hardship, disasters and climate change. It argues that resilience cannot act as an antidote to vulnerability, and aims to demonstrate the importance of shared institutions in underpinning resilience and in preventing socially created vulnerabilities. It will be of interest to academics, students and well-informed practitioners working with the concept of resilience within the subject areas of Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Environmental Humanities and International Development.

This book reflects the implications of a social performance management agenda for the perspective of twelve partners from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, who participated in a three-year microfinance action-research programme known as Imp-Act. It features contributions from MFI staff who worked with Imp-Act directly, as well as from members of Imp-Act's academic team, who worked closely with the partners. The book reflects each MFI's unique, contextualized approach to measuring and monitoring the social impacts of microfinance, emphasizing the role played by this work in improving delivery of services; increasing client satisfaction and reducing drop-outs from microfinance programmes; and increasing impacts on poverty. Running through the book are three interlinked stories: the story of Imp-Act, an action-research partnership responding to particular concerns within the microfinance industry; the story of organizational systems and learning around social impacts, and the resulting changes to service provision and working practices; and the story of changes in clients' lives. The book reveals the faces behind the social performance agenda and the processes of discovery and self-discovery that underlie programme learning. The book communicates that Imp-Act is not only about proving impact or improving services, but is also about MFIs rediscovering their mission goals and instilling a sense of purpose in their staff and clients. Above all, the book shows that each management is unique, reflecting cultural and organizational differences. Thus, in contrast to available impact assessment frameworks, learning through Imp-Act has been largely driven by the MFI's own goals and perspectives.

This volume explores questions about hope, optimism and the possibilities of the 'new' as expressed in educational thinking on the nature and problem of adolescence. One focus is on the interwar years in Australian education, and the proliferation of educational reports and programs directed to understanding, governing, educating and enlivening adolescents. This included studies of the secondary school curriculum, reviews of teaching of civics and democracy, the development of guidance programs, the specification of the needs and attributes of the adolescent, and interventions to engage the 'average student' in post-primary schooling. Framed by imperatives to respond in new ways to educational problems, and to the call of modernity, many of these programs and reforms conveyed a sense of enormous optimism in the compelling power of education and schools to foster new personal and social knowledge and transformation. A second focus is the expression of such utopianism in educational history - themes that may seem novel, or incongruous, or even inexplicable in the present - and in studies and representations of young people as citizens in the making. Finally, developing broadly genealogical approaches to the study of adolescence, the chapters variously seek to provoke more explicitly historical thinking about the construction of the field of youth studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration and History.

This volume explores questions about hope, optimism and the possibilities of the new as expressed in educational thinking on the nature and problem of adolescence. One focus is on the interwar years in Australian education, and the proliferation of educational reports and programs directed to understanding, governing, educating and enlivening adolescents. This included studies of the secondary school curriculum, reviews of teaching of civics and democracy, the development of guidance programs, the specification of the needs and attributes of the adolescent, and interventions to engage the average student in post-primary schooling. Framed by imperatives to respond in new ways to educational problems, and to the call of modernity, many of these programs and reforms conveyed a sense of enormous optimism in the compelling power of education and schools to foster new personal and social knowledge and transformation. A second focus is the expression of such utopianism in educational history themes that may seem novel, or incongruous, or even inexplicable in the present and in studies and representations of young people as citizens in the making. Finally, developing broadly genealogical approaches to the study of adolescence, the chapters variously seek to provoke more explicitly historical thinking about the construction of the field of youth studies.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the "Journal of Educational Administrative and History.""

This volume offers a critical rethinking of the construct of youth wellbeing, stepping back from taken-for-granted and psychologically inflected understandings. Wellbeing has become a catchphrase in educational, health and social care policies internationally, informing a range of school programs and social interventions and increasingly shaping everyday understandings of young people. Drawing on research by established and emerging scholars in Australia, Singapore and the UK, the book critically examines the myriad effects of dominant discourses of wellbeing on the one hand, and the social and cultural dimensions of wellbeing on the other. From diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, it explores how notions of wellbeing have been mobilized across time and space, in and out of school contexts, and the different inflections and effects of wellbeing discourses are having in education, transnationally and comparatively. The book offers researchers as well as practitioners new perspectives on current approaches to student wellbeing in schools and novel ways of thinking about the wellbeing of young people beyond educational settings.

In a time of ongoing global instability and the emergence of new fault lines of social inequality generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rights of children and young people have been thrown into sharp relief. From uncertain futures arising from the climate crisis to concerns about regressive and reactionary politics to widespread experiences of harassment, abuse and violence, young people and their advocates are mobilising for social change and making their voices heard. Across a variety of topics that engage diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and their Advocates offers a rich exploration of the dynamics between children, youth, activism, and advocacy. The chapters investigate the forms of agency expressed by young people themselves, the hope embodied in social movements, and the centrality of activism and advocacy for creating more hopeful and just futures. Considering the meanings of activism by and for children and young people in the twenty-first century, this edited collection is a valuable resource for scholars, educators and practitioners interested in the intersections of childhood and youth studies, activism and movements for social change.

Katie Wright explores how human wellbeing is constructed and how it 'travels' across spatial boundaries. She draws on empirical research, undertaken with Peruvian migrants based in London and Madrid and their Peru-based relatives and close friends to explore how human wellbeing is constructed and how it 'travels' transnationally.

This book is an examination of the contemporary fascination with psychological life and the historical developments that fostered it. Taking Australia as the focal point, Katie Wright traces the ascendancy of therapeutic culture, from nineteenth century concerns about nervousness, to the growth of psychology, the diffusion of an analytic attitude, and the spread of therapy and counseling. Wright's analysis, which draws on social theory, cultural history, and interviews with therapists and people in therapy, calls into question the pessimism that pervades many accounts of the therapeutic turn and provides an alternative assessment of its ramifications for social, political, and personal life in the globalized West. "Wright's work provides an all important antidote to a long series of off-base polemics that misunderstand the role of psychotherapy in contemporary society. Wright's work provides a sharp and welcome contrast. She finds the language of therapy at the heart of the new social movements." -Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University "The strength of Wright's work lies in its emphasis on the complex, contradictory ways in which various aspects of our global worlds enter into the inner, emotional texture of identity as well as the processes through which the unconscious imagination constitutes fabrications of the social-historical world." -Anthony Elliott, Chair of Sociology, Flinders University, Australia. "This work makes an important contribution to cultural and historical sociology. Wright argues convincingly for a reappraisal of therapeutic culture through a compelling critique of existing theory and by drawing on alternative traditions to those that have dominated scholarship in this field. The case studies she presents are intrinsically interesting and theoretically important, and her innovative perspective on the therapeutic society will make a valuable and significant contribution to the field." -Zlatko Skrbis, Dean, UQ Graduate School, The University of Queensland, Australia.