Childhood and Youth Studies

This highly accessible guide equips community work and related professionals and students to make the best use of theory in their work. Linking contemporary theory and practice, the book guides the reader through such diverse areas as young people, adult learning, health, social media and leadership in community work.

Setting out big public policy ideas, enhanced by contributions from academic and campaigning experts, as well as those with lived experience, Raising the Nation shows why we must prioritise child-centred policies to ensure the future strength of our communities, environment and economy.

Considering food consumption in a wider social context, this book offers an alternative understanding of class relations, which extends academic, political and public debates about privilege.

Addressing previously neglected groups of care leavers such as unaccompanied migrants, street youth, young parents and those with a disability, this book considers the precarity often experienced by many care leavers. It makes research relevant to practitioners and policy-makers aiming to enable, rather than label, vulnerable groups.

Written by an international list of contributors, this book presents highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods across global political time. The analysis demonstrates how international relations is quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, primarily, a time of innocence, vulnerability and incapacity.

Setting out big public policy ideas, enhanced by contributions from academic and campaigning experts, as well as those with lived experience, Raising the Nation shows why we must prioritise child-centred policies to ensure the future strength of our communities, environment and economy.

The perpetuation of poverty across generations damages lives. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and academic disciplines, along with lived experiences, this book examines why poverty is continued across generations and what needs to be done to eradicate it.

Exploring the impact of climate change and the pandemic on people’s decisions to form families and their experience of having children, this book makes a valuable contribution to debates on contemporary planetary crises.

Drawing from longitudinal research, this book shows how the perspectives of people who have been in care can help us redefine the concept of family. Through a narrative analysis of the complexity of family lives, the author challenges the idea that some families are ‘ordinary’, while others are troubled, problematic and ‘other’.

Children in the Global South continue to be affected by social disadvantage in our unequal post-colonial world order. With a focus on working-class children in Latin America, this book explores the challenges of promoting children’s rights in a context of decolonization.

What does mothering mean in different cultures and societies? This book extensively applies biographical and narrative research methods to mothering from international perspectives. Considering self-care, rapport, trust and self-reflection, the collection advances methodological practice in the study of mothers, carers and childless women’s lives.

This book shares stories from child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and peer violence about what has been learnt from the Contextual Safeguarding approach to understanding harm that happens to young people in their communities and what is required to respond.