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Young people today are frequently demonized by media images as well as by classroom reports. Dominant discourses, as ways of seeing and talking about youths, are constructed and managed by adults and offer young people a limited set of roles to play and options for engaging with society. Contributors to Re/Constructing the «Adolescent» problematize the «social construction of the adolescent» through a critique of the discourses that position youths and an examination of how youths enact, contest, and sometimes transform those same discourses. These studies, combining empirical research and semiotic analyses, offer a fresh perspective on young people in western societies today, at the level of everyday discourse, embodied through gesture and symbolic action, with material effects.
List of contents
Contents: William Ayers: Introduction - Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur: Naturalised, Restricted, Packaged, and Sold: Reifying the Fictions of «Adolescent» and «Adolescence» - Johanna Wyn: What Is Happening to «Adolescence»? Growing Up in Changing Times - Lisa Patel Stevens: Youth, Adults, and Literacies: Texting Subjectivities Within and Outside Schooling - Jrene Rahm/Karen Tracy: Doing «Good» Discussion: Young People Engaged in Politically Messy, yet Compelling Conversation - Margaret Finders: «Gotta Be Worse»: Literacy, Schooling, and Adolescent Youth Offenders - Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur: The Difference That Time and Space Make: An Analysis of Institutional and Narrative Landscapes - Judith V. Diamondstone: «Wishing and Doing»: Foreshadowing Life Choices in Writing - Lisa Hunter: Who Gets to Play? Kids, Bodies, and Schooled Subjectivities - Elizabeth Birr Moje/Caspar van Helden: Doing Popular Culture: Troubling Discourses about Youth - Mollie V. Blackburn: Talking Together for Change: Examining Positioning Between Teachers and Queer Youth - Lisa Patel Stevens: ReNaming Adolescence: Subjectivities in Complex Settings.
About the author
The Editors: Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur received her doctorate from the University of Colorado-Boulder and is currently Lecturer in Sociocultural Psychology at The University of Queensland in Australia. Her interests are primarily in applying sociocultural and critical lenses to the study of identity and, more specifically, the social construction of «at risk» identities for young people. Ethnography and critical discourse analysis frame her investigations into the everyday process of identity work.
Lisa Patel Stevens received her doctorate from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and she is currently Assistant Professor with the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Her research interests include young people, multiliteracies, critical literacy, and policy studies. Her most recent work troubles the race, class, and gender classifications traditionally used to define diversity.
Report
«This book distinguishes itself from other related titles in several ways, not least of which is its commitment to doing research 'with', not 'on', youth. By drawing attention to the experiences of young people as told through their voices, the chapter authors disrupt dominant conceptions of adolescence and open up spaces for rethinking youth, youth literacies, and youth cultures. This is a lively read - one firmly grounded in theory, research, and practice - but alive nonetheless with memorable stories about communicating across differences. Its message will linger long after the last page is turned.» (Professor Donna Alvermann, Department of Reading Education, University of Georgia, USA)
«From G. Stanley Hall to Paul Willis, we have been on an alluring search for the 'adolescent'. Maybe we've been looking in the wrong places. These studies begin by taking 'adolescence' as contemporary signifier, as social field, as historical construct, as situated body - rather than as stage, psychology or essence. 'Re/Constructing the Adolescent' is an important statement on the implausibility of a universal 'adolesecence'.» (Professor Allan Luke, Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice National Institute of Education, Singapore)
