Showing 41-60 of 60 items.

Raising Your Kids Right

Children's Literature and American Political Conservatism

Rutgers University Press

Highlighting the works of William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Bill O’Reilly, and others on the American political right, Michelle Ann Abate brings together such diverse fields as cultural studies, literary criticism, political science, childhood studies, brand marketing, and the cult of celebrity. Raising Your Kids Right dispels lingering societal attitudes that narratives for young readers are unworthy of serious political study by examining a variety of texts that offer information, ideology, and even instructions on how to raise kids right, not just figuratively but politically.

  • Copyright year: 2011
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Contesting Childhood

Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory

Rutgers University Press

Drawing on trauma and memory studies and theories of authorship and readership, Contesting Childhood offers commentary on the triumphs, trials, and tribulations that have shaped the genre of autobiographical writings about childhood. Douglas examines the content of the narratives and the limits of their representations, as well as some of the ways in which autobiographies of youth have become politically important and influential. 

  • Copyright year: 2010
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Between Good and Ghetto

African American Girls and Inner-City Violence

Rutgers University Press

Between Good and Ghetto reflects the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. Drawing on personal encounters, traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, gender studies, and feminist criminology, Nikki Jones provides a richly descriptive and compassionate account, revealing multiple strategies used to navigate interpersonal and gender-specific violence and how gendered dilemmas of their adolescence are reconciled.

  • Copyright year: 2009
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We Fight To Win

Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism

Rutgers University Press

We Fight to Win offers a compelling account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods. Focusing on adolescence and political action and deftly exploring the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender, Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California.

  • Copyright year: 2009
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Translating Childhoods

Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture

Rutgers University Press

Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, explores the "work" children perform as language and culture brokers. Children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children's own words, what it means be  the "keys to communication" that adults otherwise would lack. From ethnographic data and research, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result.

  • Copyright year: 2009
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Children and Childhood in American Religions

Rutgers University Press

Whether First Communion or bar mitzvah, religious traditions play a central role in the lives of many American children. In this collection of essays, leading scholars reveal for the first time how various religions interpret, reconstruct, and mediate their traditions to help guide children and their parents in navigating the opportunities and challenges of American life.

  • Copyright year: 2009
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Pleasures and Perils

Girls' Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture

Rutgers University Press

Pleasures and Perils follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality’s contradictions are exposed: power and powerless­ness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure.

  • Copyright year: 2009
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Pleasures and Perils

Girls' Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture

Rutgers University Press

Pleasures and Perils follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality’s contradictions are exposed: power and powerless­ness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure.

  • Copyright year: 2009
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Inventing Modern Adolescence

The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America

Rutgers University Press

In Inventing Modern Adolescence Sarah E. Chinn follows the roots of American teenage identity further back, to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Addressing the intersecting issues of urban life, race, gender, sexuality, and class consciousness, Inventing Modern Adolescence is an authoritative and engaging look at a pivotal point in American history and the intriguing, complicated, and still very pertinent teenage identity that emerged from it.

  • Copyright year: 2008
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Risky Lessons

Sex Education and Social Inequality

Rutgers University Press

Risky Lessons brings readers inside three North Carolina middle schools to show how students and teachers support and subvert the official curriculum through their questions, choices, viewpoints, and reactions. Most important, the book highlights how sex education's formal and informal lessons reflect and reinforce gender, race, and class inequalities.

  • Copyright year: 2008
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Designing Modern Childhoods

History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children

Edited by Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith; Foreword by Paula S. Fass; Epilogue by John R Gillis
Rutgers University Press

In Designing Modern Childhoods, architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald's Happy Meal. Special attention is given to how children use and interpret the spaces, buildings, and objects that are part of their lives, becoming themselves creators and carriers of culture.

  • Copyright year: 2008
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Growing Girls

The Natural Origins of Girls' Organizations in America

Rutgers University Press

Surprisingly, the "girl problem"?a crisis caused by the transition from a sheltered, family-centered Victorian childhood to modern adolescence where self-control and a strong democratic spirit were required of reliable citizens?was also solved by way of traditionally masculine, adventurous, outdoor activities, as practiced by the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and many other similar organizations.

Susan A. Miller explores these girls' organizations that sprung up in the first half of the twentieth century from a socio-historical perspective, showing how the notions of uniform identity, civic duty, "primitive domesticity," and fitness shaped the formation of the modern girl.

  • Copyright year: 2007
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Girls in Trouble with the Law

Rutgers University Press

In Girls in Trouble with the Law, sociologist Laurie Schaffner takes us inside juvenile detention centers and explores the worlds of the young women incarcerated within. Across the nation, girls of color are disproportionately represented in detention facilities, and many report having experienced physical harm and sexual assaults. For girls, the meaning of these and other factors such as the violence they experience remain undertheorized and below the radar of mainstream sociolegal scholarship. When gender is considered as an analytic category, Schaffner shows how gender is often seen through an outmoded lens.

  • Copyright year: 2006
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Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Rutgers University Press

  In this ethnographic study, Rachel Burr draws on her daily observations of working children in Hanoi and argues that these youngsters are misunderstood by the majority of agencies that seek to help them. Most aid programs embrace a model of childhood that is based on Western notions of individualism and bountiful resources. They further assume that this model is universally applicable even in cultures that advocate a collective sense of self and in countries that do not share the same economic advantages.

            Burr presents the voices and experiences of Vietnamese children in the streets, in a reform school, and in an orphanage to show that workable solutions have become lost within the rhetoric propagated by aid organizations. The reality of providing primary education or adequate healthcare for all children, for instance, does not stand a chance of being achieved until adequate resources are put in place. Yet, organizations preoccupied with the child rights agenda are failing to acknowledge the distorted global distribution of wealth in favor of Western nations.

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Imagined Orphans

Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London

Rutgers University Press

In Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch focuses on this discrepancy between the representation and the reality of children’s experiences within welfare institutions—a discrepancy that she argues stems from conflicts over middle- and working-class notions of citizenship that arose in the 1870s and persisted until the First World War. Reformers’ efforts to depict poor children as either orphaned or endangered by abusive or “no-good” parents fed upon the poor’s increasing exclusion from the Victorian social body. Reformers used the public’s growing distrust and pitiless attitude toward poor adults to increase charity and state aid to the children.

  • Copyright year: 2006
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Armies of the Young

Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism

Rutgers University Press

With a critical eye to international law, Armies of the Young urges readers to reconsider the situation of child combatants in light of circumstance and history before adopting uninformed child protectionist views. In the process, Rosen paints a memorable and unsettling picture of the role of children in international conflicts.

  • Copyright year: 2005
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Rethinking Childhood

Rutgers University Press

In Rethinking Childhood, twenty contributors, coming from the disciplines of anthropology, government, law, psychology, education, religion, philosophy, and sociology, provide a multidisciplinary view of childhood by listening and understanding the ways children shape their own futures. Topics include education, poverty, family life, divorce, neighborhood life, sports, the internet, and legal status.

  • Copyright year: 2003
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At Play in Belfast

Children's Folklore and Identities in Northern Ireland

Rutgers University Press

Donna M. Lanclos writes about children on the school playgrounds of working-class Belfast, Northern Ireland, using their own words to show how they shape their social identities. The notion that children's voices and perspectives must be included in a work about childhood is central to the book. Lanclos explores children's folklore, including skipping rhymes, clapping games, and "dirty" jokes, from five Belfast primary schools (two Protestant, two Catholic, and one mixed). 

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In Sickness and in Play

Children Coping with Chronic Illness

Rutgers University Press

In In Sickness and in Play, Cindy Dell Clark tells the stories of children who suffer from two common illnesses that are often underestimated by those not directly touched by them—asthma and diabetes. She describes how play, humor, and other expressive methods, invented by the kids themselves, allow families to cope with the pain.

  • Copyright year: 2003
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Race in the Schoolyard

Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities

Rutgers University Press

Race in the Schoolyard takes us to a place most of us seldom get to see in action¾ our children's classrooms¾ and reveals the lessons about race that are communicated there. Amanda E. Lewis spent a year observing classes at three elementary schools, two multiracial urban and one white suburban. While race of course is not officially taught like multiplication and punctuation, she finds that it nonetheless insinuates itself into everyday life in schools.

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