Rethinking youth voice and institutional power: Reflections from inside a service learning partnership in a California juvenile hall

This article shares the dilemmas that emerge from a community service project that engages students in a systematic critique of the juvenile justice system from the inside. It explores how competing images of youth (as dangerous thugs, vulnerable children and kids who have made bad choices) coexist uneasily within the juvenile justice system and significantly shape and constrain this community service learning project. They influence how volunteers understand their experiences and relationships with students inside, and they shape how young people in the system speak about their own lives, the inequalities they see around them, and the juvenile justice system itself. By exploring these dynamics this article aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of youth voice.     

Children’s Concerns about their Parents’ Health and Well‐being: Researching with ChildLine Scotland

This paper reports on collaborative research conducted with ChildLine Scotland, a free, confidential, telephone counselling service, using their database. We focussed on children’s calls about parental health and well‐being and how this affected their own lives. Children’s concerns emerged within multi‐layered calls in which they discussed multiple issues and problems in their lives such as alcohol misuse, drug misuse, domestic violence, family relationships, depression, mental health problems and bereavement. We discuss how children were making sense of these experiences; how they were trying to get by in difficult family circumstances; whose help they valued; and conclude with implications for policy and practice.     

What's Wrong with Being Poor? The Problems of Poverty,as Young People Describe them

This article explores how young people living in low‐income neighbourhoods problematise their own lives, using data generated as part of a participatory policy project with five groups of young people, aged 11–21. Three common problems were identified; housing, education and crime, as well as one common silence around their own agency. This silence is perhaps substituted by a focus on collective agency and politics, suggesting that perhaps young people can see poverty as a more collective problem than previous research may highlight.     

Subject Positioning,Fear, and Insecurity in South Asian Muslim Communities in the War on Terror Context

This paper focuses on the subject positioning of South Asian Muslim communities in Montreal in the sociopolitical context of the war on terror (WOT) in Canada after 9/11. Drawing upon community studies, the results highlight the ways in which the climate of fear and suspicion associated with heightened security and antiterrorism concerns shapes the lives of these respondents and how they respond to it in their local contexts. The increased external scrutiny these communities face is also associated with an internalization of fear, which becomes a self‐regulating factor of how they view themselves, their relationships with members of their own communities, and their belonging within the larger society.     

Smuggled Sound: Bootleg Recording and the Pursuit of Popular Memory

This paper explores the meanings that bootleg recording holds in peoples’ lives. “Bootlegging” refers to the practice of making unauthorized recordings of live performances. Our paper is an interpretive analysis of interviews with bootleg producers and collectors. In their accounts, they suggest how their activities offer an extraordinary example of what it means to participate in contemporary popular culture. As bootleggers smuggle tape recorders into concerts, or trade tapes in underground networks, they pursue rare artifacts of popular culture. Their stories of bootleg taping, collecting and trading suggest an alternative to depictions of popular culture as merely a process of production and consumption. Instead, these accounts demonstrate how some people document their participation in mass cultural events on their own terms and for their own uses. Here, bootlegging is seen as an attempt by people to capture live performances, to collect them as a source of memory and authenticity, and to mediate the events of their lives through means of technological reproduction.     

The Restorative Power of Emotions in Child Protection Services

The paper examines the significance of our emotional life for validation, enrichment and guidance in everyday behavior. Child protection services (CPS) workers need to understand how emotions affect family dynamics and, in particular, parental behavior as a basis for their work with families. Moreover, in order for CPS workers to be aware of, and professionally responsive to, the importance of a family's emotions requires that they are comfortable with their own feelings. This means that they need to work in CPS agencies which recognize and support this practice orientation. The paper also addresses how the agency can influence CPS workers to become more knowledgeable and attuned to, not only the families' emotional lives, but also to their own.     

Friends and family: regulation and relationships on the locked ward

This ethnographic project explored the lives of women with learning disabilities on three locked wards. Aspects of these women’s lives were regulated by the service; in particular, relationships with family outside the unit, and peer relationships inside the unit. The women in this study valued these relationships, but they were treated with ambivalence by the service. Success in future community integration and accessing community resources can be dependent on the nature and quality of relationships with others, and therefore services should acknowledge that service-users need to forge relationships of their own choosing.     

Faith,work, and women in a changing world: the influence of religion in the lives of beedi rollers in West Bengal

In India, religious norms and values play a significant role in regulating the lives of women and girls in many communities. This article looks at how the lives of women and girl beedi (hand rolled cigarette) rollers in a Muslim community in West Bengal are influenced by their religious background, highlighting the complex relationship between gender, faith, and work. Secondly, the article discusses how secular NGOs – which in India are often seen to be hesitant in addressing questions of religious faith and practice – can engage in development work with women and girls in faith-based communities. The article focuses on the experiences of two secular NGOs working with women beedi workers in villages in Murshidabad, as they come to understand that to bring about significant changes in women's lives they must open up discussions around sensitive religious belief, within the community and their own organisations.     

Echoes from the Past: Intergenerational Memories in Cyprus

The purpose of this article is to describe young people's awareness of their parents’ and grandparents’ stories of the events of 1974 in Cyprus and to evaluate the extent to which they perceive teachers as other key figures in their lives endorsing family accounts of history. The article is based on focus group discussions with 20 Turkish Cypriot and 20 Greek Cypriot teenagers from two schools in Cyprus. The article describes how in some cases, young people appropriate these memories as their own, while in other cases, they acknowledge how the passing of time dilutes the significance of past events and allows some young people to envisage a different collective future.     

How formerly abducted women in post-conflict situations are reasserting their humanity in a hostile environment: photovoice evidence from northern Uganda

ABSTRACT

Northern Uganda received significant international attention during and immediately after the conflict between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, in which over 20,000 women and children were abducted and trafficked. However, globally there has been little investigation into the long-term impacts on formerly abducted women in post-conflict reconstruction, or on their own efforts to improve their conditions. This article presents original photovoice evidence from 13 co-researchers; all members of the Women’s Advocacy Network, a grassroots organisation seeking to improve life in northern Uganda for women. All the co-researchers are from the Acholi ethnic group and were formerly abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. They are all engaged in rebuilding their lives in Gulu, northern Uganda. The article seeks to present the work of the co-researchers and explores the long-term needs they identify for formerly abducted women in conflict zones. It also explores how their own experiences with abduction continues to erode the recognition of their humanity, both in terms of how they are perceived by their communities and how they view themselves, and how they are individually and collectively working to reassert their place in the moral universe.     

“It Is Not a Big Deal,I Can Do It,Too”: Influence of Parental Divorce on Professional Women's Marital Experience in Turkey

This article reports on a study of how parental divorce affects the marriage and divorce experiences of professional women in Turkey. Drawing on the retrospective accounts of eight professional women in relation to their own divorce and those of their parents, this study highlights the role of parental divorce and cultural context in adult children's attitudes, beliefs, and experiences regarding their own union formation. Based on this small qualitative sample, results demonstrate that parental divorce affected women's entire lives, with considerable impact on their commitment to marriage and view of divorce in general. They learn from their parents that marriages can be broken when they do not function properly. As a result, instead of being more patient or self- sacrificing, as is frequently advised to women in Turkish society, the women in this study readily tended toward divorce as a viable solution to marital problems.     

Performing on a Wider Stage: Developing Inner-City Youth Through Play and Performance

This article reports on an ethnographic study of a youth leadership program that utilizes play and performance to support the development of inner-city youth. Participant observation and focus groups were used to learn about young people’s experience participating in the program and how they perceive its effect on their lives. The findings demonstrated that approaching the activities in the program as performances provided participants a way to practice being who they are not, a language for understanding their own development, and a way to become creators of developmental environments for themselves and others.     

Beyond the body in a box: Visualizing contexts of children's action

Social scientists refer routinely to a range of social and cultural contexts in trying to understand children's lives, but this range may not include what children think or say about what they do. In this article, I examine how two girls thought about their efforts to mummify a Barbie Doll as part of a school project. Attending to what the girls said about their project led me to regard strings of related activities—as defined by kids—as an important but neglected context of children's action. After reviewing how the girls’ work cut across the contexts familiar to social scientists, I examine the implications of “activity series” for visualizing kids and their contexts, in theory and in photographs.     

Children's Challenges to Efforts to Save Them: Competing Knowledges in the Child Welfare System

The child welfare system is founded on a belief that children are sometimes endangered by their parents or caregivers and must be saved by agents of the state. Children are perceived as objects to be saved, but they are rarely seen as active strategists in their interactions with child welfare system social workers. Using ethnographic data collected during observations of social workers and juvenile court proceedings, this article shows how children have their own complex understandings of state intervention and strive—to varying degrees of success—to contest official views of their lives and provide competing forms of knowledge. Specifically, children attempt to rework state actors' perceptions of their families and familial problems, use state actors as an audience for their versions of their lives, and attempt to mobilize state power for personal or material gain.     

The psychological consequences of midlife men's social comparisons with their young adult sons

I examine how midlife men (N= 542) compare their work and family lives with those of their young adult sons, and how these comparisons affect the fathers’ self‐evaluations. Analyses are based on quantitative and qualitative data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Fathers who rate their work lives as more successful than their sons’ have elevated self‐esteem only when they also report being very close with their children. Open‐ended interviews reveal that men derive pride from financially supporting their families, yet normative and economic constraints of the “good provider” role prevented them from pursuing their own career aspirations and from maintaining close parent‐child ties. Intergenerational social comparisons highlight the distinctive work and family constraints felt by the midlife fathers.     

Kids Talking About Race: Tween‐agers in a Post‐Civil Rights Era

Our research examines how American children understand and talk about how race matters in their everyday lives. We draw on interviews with 44 middle school children who attend schools in an integrated county‐wide system and find that while some use color‐blind rhetoric, most children in our study know that race matters, while they offer alternative accounts for why and how. Some explain race as social inequality, while others offer cultural accounts of racial differences. Our analysis suggests that for white children, gender matters; more girls describe racial inequality than boys. For children of color, class seems to be key, with middle‐class children giving cultural explanations, including negative evaluations of others in their own racial group. We use an intersectionality framework to analyze the alternative and complex narratives children give for their own experiences of race and race relations between peers.     

Current Issues in Alternative Media Research

Research in alternative media has burgeoned since the turn of the millennium. The majority of studies has examined the political and social dimensions of alternative media and has focused on the media of social movements. The value of these amateur media projects lies not only in the content they produce, but also in the educational and political empowerment they offer to their participants. Other forms of alternative media, such as blogs and fanzines, present challenges to mainstream journalism; they challenge the exclusive authority and expertise of professional journalists. Recent research has begun to examine the relationship between alternative and mainstream media practices, particularly examining how alternative media offer ways of rebalancing media power and how 'ordinary' people are able to represent their own lives and experiences and concerns in ways that are often ignored or marginalised by the dominant media institutions. However, we need to learn more about specific alternative media practices and how audiences use their content.     

Everyday health and identity management among older women with chronic health conditions

The majority of older women have at least one chronic health problem and coping with multiple conditions is common with advancing old age. In this longitudinal, qualitative study we explored the health perceptions of older women (N = 36) with multiple chronic conditions. Guided by a symbolic interactionist perspective, our research questions asked: (a) how do older women with chronic health conditions interpret their own health in their everyday lives and (b) how do they talk about their health with others. We found that women depended on their embodied self, or signs from the body, to interpret their everyday health. The women engage in identity management to make sense of limitations caused by their chronic health conditions. They regulated how much and with whom they were willing to share issues related to their everyday health. Findings suggest that everyday health is important in identity construction among older adults.     

Migrant Children,Social Capital and Access to Services Post‐Migration: Transitions,Negotiations and Complex Agencies

For migrant children, moving to a new country is marked by excitement, anxiety and practical challenges in managing this significant transition. This paper draws upon the concepts of social capital and social networks to examine migrant children's access to services post‐migration. Using data from a qualitative study with Eastern European families in Scotland, we identify a range of cumulative barriers that limit children's access to services and illustrate how their experiences are shaped by ethnicity, social class and place. The study shows that migrant children are often disadvantaged post‐migration and develop their own mechanisms to mitigate the impact of migration on their lives. We argue that migrant children's own social networks are relevant and they need to be analysed through a more individualised approach.