Almost a third of the 4 billion people living in urban areas today are children, according to the United Nations. By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s children will live in cities. Yet how has recent sociological work engaged with children and youth living in cities around the world? What does a focus on children and youth in an urban context mean for researchers working within a variety of sociological frameworks? How have children’s and youth’s experiences shaped and been shaped by the diverse urban scapes and contexts in which they live? Sociological Research and Urban Children and Youth brings together cutting-edge work that addresses children’s and youth’s urban living experiences as well as the social, political, and ecological realities that accompany this. Featuring contributions from Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the United States, the chapters critically engage with core analytical and conceptual issues ranging from relationality to citizenship and belonging, to power, structure, and agency. Recognizing the potential research with and about young people can have in decision making on multiple levels of policy and service provision, Sociological Research and Urban Children and Youth provides a key foundation for considering the influence of urban environments on young people, and vice versa.

It was 2006, and eight hundred soldiers from the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) base in pseudonymous "Armyville," Canada, were scheduled to deploy to Kandahar. Many students in the Armyville school district were destined to be affected by this and several subsequent deployments. These deployments, however, represented such a new and volatile situation that the school district lacked--as indeed most Canadians lacked--the understanding required for an optimum organizational response. Growing Up in Armyville provides a close-up look at the adolescents who attended Armyville High School (AHS) between 2006 and 2010. How did their mental health compare with that of their peers elsewhere in Canada? How were their lives affected by the Afghanistan mission--at home, at school, among their friends, and when their parents returned with post-traumatic stress disorder? How did the youngsters cope with the stress? What did their efforts cost them? Based on questions from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, administered to all youth attending AHS in 2008, and on in-depth interviews with sixty-one of the youth from CAF families, this book provides some answers. It also documents the partnership that occurred between the school district and the authors' research team. Beyond its research findings, this pioneering book considers the past, present, and potential role of schools in supporting children who have been affected by military deployments. It also assesses the broader human costs to CAF families of their enforced participation in the volatile overseas missions of the twenty-first century.

Social inequality. Selective political attention. Insufficient funding and access. Caring for Children provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of the crisis in care for Canadian children and their caregivers. The contributors explore the complex issues surrounding caring for children, analyzing the connections between services and programs to reveal how child care, parental leave, informal care, live-in caregiver programs, and child tax benefits affect the well-being of Canadian children and their families. They affirm the necessity of questioning political attitudes and arrangements and ask what social movements can do to promote positive change in approaches to the care of children.