Critical Youth Studies Reader: Preface by Paul Willis

This book won the 2014 AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award. This reader begins a conversation about the many aspects of critical youth studies. Chapters in this volume consider essential issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, and schooling in creating a dialogue about and a conversation with youth. In a society that continues to devalue, demonize, and pathologize young women and men, leading names in the academy and youth communities argue that traditional studies of youth do not consider young people themselves. Engaging with today’s young adults in formal and informal pedagogical settings as an act of respect, social justice, and transgression creates a critical pedagogical path in which to establish a meaningful twenty-first century critical youth studies.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Awad Ibrahim: Critical Youth Studies: An Introduction – Douglas Kellner: Toward a Critical Theory of Youth – Kate Tilleczek: Theorizing Young Lives: Biography, Society, and Time – Susan Talburt/Nancy Lesko: Historicizing Youth Studies – Marcel Danesi: The Symbolism of Cool in Adolescence and Youth Culture – Michael O’Loughlin/P. Taylor Van Zile IV: Becoming Revolutionaries: Toward Non-Teleological and Non-Normative Notions of Youth Growth – Suzana Feldens Schwertner/Rosa Maria Bueno Fischer: Youth: Multiple Connectivities, New Temporalities, and Early Nostalgia – John Smyth: An ‘Evolving Criticality’ in Youth and/or Student Voice in Schools in Hardening Neoliberal Times – Paul Willis: Foot Soldiers of Modernity: The Dialectics of Cultural Consumption and the 21st Century School – Henry A. Giroux: No Bailouts for Youth: Broken Promises and Dashed Hopes – Dwayne Donald/Mandy Krahn: Abandoning Pathologization: Conceptualizing Indigenous Youth Identity as Flowing from Communitarian Understandings – Jill Guy/Jon Austin: See Me, Hear Me: Engaging With Australian Aboriginal Youth and Their Lifeworlds – Dennis Carlson: ‘It Gets Better’: Queer Youth and the History of the «Problem of the Homosexual» in Public Education – Cathryn Teasley: Cross-Cultural Reflections on Gender Diversity in the Earliest Stages of Youth Identity Formation – sj Miller: Moving an Anti-Bullying Stance Into Schools: Supporting the Identities of Transgender and Gender Variant Youth – Nichole E. Grant/Timothy J. Stanley: Reading the Wallpaper: Disrupting Performances of Whiteness in the Blog, «Stuff White People Like» – Virginia Lea/Maria Sylvia Edouard-Gundowry: Targeted by the Crosshairs: Student Voices on Colonialism, Racism, and Whiteness as Barriers to Educational Equity – Marlon Simmons: Politics of Urban Diasporized Youth and Possibilities for Belonging – Fabiola Martinez/Elizabeth Quintero: Conocimiento: Mixtec Youth sin fronteras – Saba Alvi: From Hijabi to Ho-jabi: Voguing the Hijab and the Politics Behind an Emerging Subculture – Nicholas Ng-A-Fook/Linda Radford/Tasha Ausman: Living Hyph-E-Nations: Marginalized Youth, Social Networking, and Third Spaces – Susan Beierling: A Fat Woman’s Story of Body-Image Politics and the Weighty Discourses of Magnification and Minimization – Dana Hasson: «Breaking» Stereotypes: How Are Youth With Disability Represented in Mainstream Media? – Elizabeth J. Meyer: She’s the Man: Deconstructing the Gender and Sexuality Curriculum at «Hollywood High» – Eloise Tan: Learning Filipino Youth Identities: Positive Portrayals or Stifling Stereotypes? – Kerri Mesner/Carl Leggo: Surprising Representations of Youth in Saved! and Loving Annabelle – Lynn Corcoran: «He Seemed Like Such a Nice Guy»: Youth, Intimate Partner Violence, and the Media – Tracy D. Keats: We Don’t Need Another Hero: Captaining in Youth Sport – Renee K. L. Wikaire/Joshua I. Newman: Decolonizing Sport-Based Youth Development – Nathan Snaza/John A. Weaver: Posthuman(ist) Youth: Control, Play, and Possibilities – Donyell L. Roseboro: Mediated Youth, Curriculum, and Cyberspace: Pivoting the In-Between – Kelsey Catherine Schmitz: Why Is My Champion so «Hot»?: Gender Performance in the Online Video Game League of Legends – Robert Jones: Machinima: Gamers Start Playing Director – Angel Lin: Hip Hop Pedagogies in/for Transformation of Youth Identities: A Pilot Project – Curry Malott/Brad Porfilio: Punk Rock, Hip Hop, and the Politics of Human Resistance: Reconstituting the Social Studies Through Critical Media Literacy – Haidee Smith Lefebvre: The Breaking (Street Dance) Cipher: A Shared Context for

About the Author :
Awad Ibrahim is professor of Education, University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interest in cultural studies, Hip Hop, youth, and Black popular culture, social foundations (philosophy, history, and sociology of education), social justice and community service learning, diasporic and continental African identities, ethnography, and applied linguistics. He has researched and published widely in these areas. Among his books are The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity and the Politics of Becoming (Peter Lang, 2014); Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and the Arts of the Possible (2014) with Nicholas Ng-A-Fook and Giuliano Reis; Global Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language (2009) with Samy Alim and Alastair Pennycook. Shirley R. Steinberg is research chair and professor of Youth Studies and director of The Werklund Foundation Centre for Youth Leadership in Education at the University of Calgary. Her most recent books include: Critical Qualitative Research Reader (2012); Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (2011); Teaching Against Islamophobia (2011); 19 Urban Questions: Teaching in the City (2010); and the award-winning Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia with Priya Parmar and Birgit Richard (2005). She is a national columnist for CTV News Channel's Culture Shock and a regular contributor to CBC Radio One, CTV, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette, and the Canadian press. The organizer of The International Institute for Critical Pedagogy and Transformative Leadership, she is committed to a global community of transformative educators and community workers engaged in social justice, and the situating of power within social and cultural contexts. Freireproject.org