The Art of Restraint: How Experienced Program Leaders Use Their Authority to Support Youth Agency

The staff of youth development programs perform a delicate balancing act between supporting youth agency and exercising necessary authority. To understand this balancing in daily practice, we interviewed 25 experienced (M = 14 years) leaders of arts, leadership, and technology programs for high‐school‐aged youth. We obtained accounts of when, how, and why they gave advice, set limits, and “supported youth when disagreeing.” Qualitative analysis found surprising similarities across leaders. They used authority to give advice and set limits, but did so with reasoned restraint. Maximizing youth's opportunities to learn from experience was central in their decision making. They described employing authority in intentional ways aimed at helping youth's work succeed, strengthening youth's agency, and building skills for agency (e.g., critical thinking, “clarifying intent”).     

Enchanted companionship of Korean Catholic youth amid compressed individualization

Korean youth are confronted with “existential vulnerability” in an uncertain labor market. “Compressed individualization” reflects a high-risk society in Korea's socio-economic context and acts as the social backdrop for the “privatization of religion.” Despite de-religionization or the unchurching climate, what are the peculiar features of Korean Catholic youth who are actively participating in a church group? The authors selected five Catholic youth groups and conducted in-depth interviews with 18 of their members. Highly religious young Catholics demonstrate coping with existential insecurity amid compressed individualization via “enchanted companionship” experienced through prayer, sharing, or service. Despite differences in communal culture between groups, the peculiar features of their enchanted companionship include holistic healing, reciprocal transcendence, and solidarity. Amid the youth's struggles to find their way toward the fullness of life, these communities offer them a “free and gratuitous haven” distinct from secular ties in the utilitarian and disenchanted world. They can also voluntarily discover the significance of life through their activities, reflections, and missions. In sum, this study explains how religiosity is formed through a socio-existential vulnerability in youth's lived religion at a micro-level analysis, and signifies enchanted companionship as a key mechanism counteracting the waves of the secular world.     

Beyond resilience: Resistance in the lives of LGBTQ youth

Resilience has come to define a wide breadth of impactful research on marginalized groups, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. This resilience framework shifted the deficit “at-risk” model of research on marginalized populations to a more nuanced strengths-based perspective. In this critical review article, we examine this research trend to understand how the shift to resilience has shaped patterns of LGBTQ youth research. In doing so, this piece calls for a more sophisticated engagement with operationalizing resilience–which is vaguely defined and often upholds dominant relations in society, such as capitalistic, heteronormative values of success and happiness. We show how a shift to understanding resistance, joy, and pleasure in LGBTQ youth's lives promotes a more dynamic and complicated look at how marginalized groups navigate their social worlds and exert power in shaping these worlds. Acknowledging and uplifting LGBTQ youth's resistance and power are necessary in pushing scholarly dialogue and the possible interventions informed by research towards a more fully transformative framework in changing and dismantling oppressive societal structures.     

The Self as Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy

Using a combination of psychoanalytic and symbolic interactionist ideas, this article portrays the development of the self as a self‐fulfilling prophecy (SFP). A prominent psychoanalytic version of this idea is presented by Lacan's two mirror theories of the self. A prominent and more familiar symbolic interactionist account of the self as self‐fulfilling prophecy is the formulation by William I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas, which suggests that once situations are defined as real, they are real in their consequences. The aim of this article is to show that these two perspectives can be reconciled in interesting ways, because both recognize that emotions are part of the world “out there” of external goals and the world “in here” of the person's inner life. Emotions are therefore “bilevel.” The SFP creates a fault line in the self and a consequent emotional vulnerability when that line is engaged or disturbed. This article explains how this self‐fulfilling prophecy works and explores the weaknesses it inflicts on the self.     

Grounded in the World: Developmental Origins of the Embodied Mind

Piaget's (1952) question of how the adult mind emerges from the sensorimotor infant is still the framing issue for developmental psychology. Here I suggest that real‐life skill is better understood if the sensorimotor origins of cognition are not abandoned. Skilled people are not only better at both abstract and logical thinking but also at processing the world “online” and, most important, seamlessly and rapidly shifting between the two modes. I illustrate the tight coupling between action, perception, and cognition in early life and propose that this coupling remains but becomes more flexibly adaptive. Further, I show that the language of dynamics is appropriate to capture these mind‐body‐world interconnections.     

Youth Civic Engagement in the Twenty‐First Century

We enter the 21st century contending with the end of the Cold War's legacy of political uncertainty, expecting youth to play a significant part in the search for new principles that will bring about stability in the world political order. In forging the future, youth will have to collaborate with adults, but on terms more fitting of the historical circumstances that lie ahead than those of the past. This was the framework adopted by a group of social scientists who held several discussions to reflect on the issues and opportunities that bear on youth's civic engagement and development in the century that has just opened. The present article describes the results of those conversations, starting with the issue of defining civic competence, and the finding that an expansive definition is needed to match the real‐world circumstances that affect its development for youth internationally. Specific conditions, such as globalization, information – communication technology, and immigration, are emphasized as forces that affect youth and need to be taken into account by educators and policy makers. In this regard, responsibilities of schools, government, the commercial sector, and community organizations are outlined. Each is viewed as a potential constructive force for promoting engagement insofar as youth's strengths are recognized and focus is placed on building on youth's proven capacities. As always, it is youth’s task to make history in the future and society's obligation to provide youth with sufficient resources and an honest basis for hope in carrying out this task. The authors' policy recommendations are founded on this reciprocal relation that binds the youth generation with its elders in the common task of preserving, while transforming, society for the good of humanity.     

Sexuality Education in the United States: Shared Cultural Ideas across a Political Divide

“Sexuality education”– broadly defined as teaching and learning about a range of issues related to puberty, sexuality, and relationships – occurs all day every day, formally and informally, intentionally and unintentionally. Nevertheless, adults organize policy and instruction for young people around a constrained set of concerns: first, that the sexuality education youth receive does not help them navigate an increasingly sexualized and dangerous world and, second, that the lessons are themselves damaging, exacerbating the risks youth and children already face. I discuss sexuality education’s entanglement with these conventional cultural ideas about youth, sexuality, and education. I consider the ways that abstinence‐only and comprehensive school‐based sexuality education rest on a series of a discursive framings, including a commitment to regulating sexuality and youth, a contemporary “moral panic” that renders all talk about youth and sexuality provocative, and normative and instrumental conceptions of teaching and learning about sexuality. I conclude by discussing the implications of these discursive framings for classroom practice and imagining an alternative model in which sexuality education might embrace ambiguity and ambivalence as a necessary and even welcome condition of young people’s sexuality and education.     

Sexual Risk‐Taking Among Recently Emancipated Female Foster Youth: Sexual Trauma and Failed Family Reunification Experiences

Foster youth evidence shows elevated rates of risk behaviors, including sexual risk‐taking (e.g., unprotected sex). Some studies have identified child maltreatment, particularly sexual abuse, as a risk for later sexual risk‐taking, but none have examined how child welfare placement experiences relate to youth's sexual risk‐taking. This study investigated relations among child maltreatment, child welfare placements, and sexual risk‐taking among 114 recently emancipated female foster youth. Sexual abuse and failed reunifications with parents were associated with greater sexual risk‐taking. Moreover, dissociative symptoms exacerbated the relation between sexual abuse and sexual risk‐taking. These findings highlight the need for greater consideration of risks associated with emancipated youth's sexual risk‐taking and for more research to understand how youth experience unsuccessful family reunifications.     

Thinking with the Mind,Syncing with the Body: Ballet as Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Interaction

Symbolic interactionist theory describes self‐consciousness as arising through symbolic interaction. I use one empirical case, ballet training, to suggest that symbolic interaction can, by producing self‐consciousness, cultivate unself‐consciousness. Using in‐depth interviews with twenty‐three individuals reporting on training experiences in six countries and twenty‐three American states, I show that dancers can learn, through self‐conscious symbolic interaction, how it feels to embody what an audience sees, as they strive to train their bodies to portray an institutionalized aesthetic. The embodiment of technique facilitates a markedly unself‐conscious “flow” experience while performing. In contrast, having an acute awareness of embodying an incompatible physiology inhibits flow and often motivates dancers to self‐select out of ballet. These interactionist sources of “nonsymbolic” interaction both evoke and suppress “mind” through social interaction.     

Performing Beauty: Dove's “Real Beauty” Campaign

Dove, a popular beauty brand, impressed some in the advertising world with its unique “Campaign for Real Beauty” and made others cringe. But little is known about how real women respond. “Real” beauty according to Dove means various shapes and sizes—flaws and all—and is the key to rebranding, rebuilding women's self‐esteem, and redefining beauty standards. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with sixteen Canadian women and guided by social semiotics and dramaturgy, I examine Dove's presentation of beauty and women's reactions to it from a “beauty as performance” frame. This study examines processes of interpretation and finds that expressing beauty, the self, and a public image inextricably requires elements of performance.     

“I'm the Next American Idol”: Cooling Out,Accounts, and Perseverance at Reality Talent Show Auditions

Drawing on fieldwork at American Idol auditions, I describe how contestants come to accept their fate after being cut from the competition. I revisit Goffman's metaphor of “cooling the mark out,” especially the cooling out strategy of offering people another chance to qualify for roles at which they failed. Contestants' desires to audition and audition again after failure are driven by meritocratic ideals. They develop accounts in line with these ideals to explain how despite being rejected they are talented and can still excel in the future. This study contributes to literature on “cooling out” by highlighting how people draw on larger systems of meaning—ideologies supporting meritocratic values in the case of Idol contestants—when making sense of their failures.     

Students in distress: Unanticipated findings in a cyber bullying study

This article discusses the use of quantitative measures to foster the agency and capabilities of children and youth research participants, and facilitate opportunities for students to receive social services. Based on unanticipated findings of a cyber bullying study among students in grades 4, 7 and 10, we discuss how quantitative measures identified youth “in distress” and allowed opportunities for students to obtain resources that would be helpful. Data indicate that students were able to express their agency by navigating the quantitative phase of the research process in ways that met their needs. These findings suggest that quantitative methods should be included among a range of research methodologies that can promote children and youth's agency and unique voices; meaningfully engage children and youth; and offer benefits to youth participants.     

Desiring Self‐Determination in Research and Beyond: Parental Consent Requirements and Situated Ethics for Migrant Young People Living amid Changing Family Dynamics

How are procedural research ethics complicit in homogenising and paternalising young people? Through a youth‐centred ethnographic study completed in Canada, I illustrate how migrant young people's complex experiences of family separation, responsibility, and autonomy sit in relation to parental consent requirements for research. By complicating notions of childhood and critically discussing capacity to consent, I elucidate how procedural ethics can negate diversity among young people and perpetuate the structural barriers some face in determining their lives. More flexible ethical procedures and responses could reduce barriers and better accommodate young people's inclusion by recognising their specific circumstances, desires and competencies through heightened contextual awareness.     

Why Trust Matters: How Confidence in Leaders Transforms What Adolescents Gain From Youth Programs

Youth's trust in program leaders is considered a key to the positive impact of youth programs. We sought to understand how trust influences youth's program experiences from their perspective. We interviewed 108 ethnically diverse youth (ages 12–19) participating in 13 arts, leadership, and technology programs. Analysis of these accounts suggested five ways in which youth's trust in leaders amplified program benefits. Trust increased youth's (1) confidence in leaders' guidance in program activities, (2) motivation in the program, (3) use of leaders for mentoring, (4) use of leaders as a model of a well‐functioning relationship, and (5) experience of program cohesiveness. Across benefits, trust allowed youth to draw on leaders' expertise, opened them to new experiences, and helped increase youth's agency.     

Teacher Careers and Inhabited Institutions: Sense‐Making and Arsenals of Teaching Practice in Educational Institutions

This article advances emerging scholarship that emphasizes the benefits to new institutional theories of organizational functioning offered by empirical research rooted in the tradition of symbolic interactionism. I present evidence from in‐depth interviews with teachers from three high schools to show how individuals' perspectives about pursuing institutional goals are filtered through their accumulated experience working within those institutions. Findings show teachers develop what I call “arsenals of teaching practice” as they accumulate work experience, and this process creates a key source of difference by career stage among teachers that shapes their instructional decisions. I discuss implications for understanding the relationship between policy and practice, and extend existing theory of inhabited institutions by identifying a key way that people's sense‐making through experience drives institutional functioning.     

Pregnant Women's Experiences of Crisis Pregnancy Centers: When Abortion Stigmatization Succeeds and Fails

There is broad consensus that abortion is stigmatized, but the role of interpersonal interaction in this process is underspecified. I examine interviews with 25 women in the United States who visited crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)—antiabortion organizations that offer one‐on‐one “prolife counseling”—for how and when interactions matter for abortion stigmatization. I identify two primary ways CPC counselors stigmatized abortion and describe variation in their impact: counselors' efforts were “successful,” were misrecognized as ideologically‐neutral, or were resisted. The findings demonstrate the importance of women's current consideration of abortion and preexisting beliefs for understanding how interpersonal interactions contribute to abortion stigma.     

Displaying Gender: Transgender People's Strategies in Everyday Life

Drawing upon data from in‐depth interviews with transgender people in Portugal and in the United Kingdom, this article critically reflects upon different ways through which transgender people recreate their gender displays, particularly in terms of gender embodiment and aesthetics, in order to navigate their everyday lives. I focus on four strategies of articulating gender displays with one's own gender subjectivities: “blending in,” “masking,” “naturalizing,” and “subverting.” These strategies are not exclusive of one another. They are used differently throughout the participants' own lives in accordance to the social contexts they were in.     

Troubling Whiteness: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

This article focuses on Harris's (this issue) understanding of racialized subjectivity as a socially constructed phenomenon where fantasies about race are transmitted intergenerationally. I was raised as a “white” South African and I had two vivid associations to Harris's proposal that a “psychose blanche,” an invisible repository of unsignified, racially inflected thoughts, feelings, and selves exists at the heart of “whiteness.” In both cases I recalled a scene from my youth where I was taught that whites in apartheid South Africa deserved punishment and would receive this “come the revolution.” These lessons were crucial building blocks in the formation of my racialized subjectivity, and I describe and interrogate them in an attempt to add further variety and color to the landscape that Harris so deftly draws as she resignifies her “whiteness.”     

The Lens of Victim Contests and Youth Crime Stat Wars

In this article I examine Canadian youth crime debates as a way to explore the connection between “victim contests” and “stat wars.” I address how constructing young offenders as either victims or victimizers generates “victim contests,” which in turn serve as interpretive anchoring points shaping how youth crime statistics are interpreted. The numbers themselves do not matter, as underlying assumptions about young offender identity and culpability become a lens through which numbers are understood. In this sense, victim contests generate “stat wars,” involving numbers that act to “make up people.” I also explore some broader implications of these connections, especially given the increasingly actuarial responses to youth crime in late‐modern Western society.     

From “Swinging Hard” to “Rocking Out”: Classification of Style and the Creation of Identity in the World of Drumming

This article takes a social constructionist approach to the study of a seldom considered subculture—the “world” of drumming. I describe this subculture from both the “etic” and “emic” perspectives, showing how drummers and drumming are perceived and experienced by the musicians themselves (insiders) as well as the “outside” public. The main focus is on the drummers' intersubjective “mental maps” of their world, specifically exploring how they create musical and personal identities by adhering to a rigid classification scheme surrounding “styles” of drumming. I demonstrate how drummers use drumming equipment, personal appearance, education, and “purist” attitudes to separate styles of drumming and to construct distinct social selves. Of special interest is how drummers are cognitively socialized into “thought communities” which teach and reinforce attitudinal and behavioral norms. I conclude with a discussion of the possibilities of applying my analytical framework to other worlds of music and art, as well as some forms of occupational and avocational specialization.