This volume contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary controversies about the moral, legal and political status of children and childhood. It comprises essays by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds on diverse theoretical problems and public policy controversies that bear upon different facets of the life of children in contemporary liberal democracies. The book is divided into three major parts that are each organized around a common general theme. The first part (“Children and Childhood: Autonomy, Well-Being and Paternalism”) focusses on key concepts of an ethics of childhood. Part two (“Justice for Children”) contains chapters that are concerned with the topics of justice for children and justice during childhood. The third part (“The Politics of Childhood”) deals with issues that concern the importance of `childhood ́ as a historically contingent political category and its relevance for the justification and practical design of political processes and institutions that affect children and families.

Employing a social justice framework, this book provides educational leaders and practitioners with tools and strategies for grappling with the political fray of education politics. The framework offers ways to critique, challenge, and alter social, cultural, and political patterns in organizations and systems that perpetuate inequities. The authors focus on the processes through which educational politics is enacted, illustrating how inequitable power relations are embedded in our democratic systems. Readers will explore education politics at five focal points of power (micro, local/district, state, federal, and global). The text provides examples of how to “work the system” in ways that move toward greater justice and equity in schools. “This book challenges those who want to work toward justice with critical starting points, conversation starters, and strategies for collaborative leadership.” —From the Foreword by Enrique Aleman, The University of Texas at San Antonio “If educators are truly committed to their students, this text provides the analytic tools and consequent strategies to make public schools better for all of our students. Bravo!” —Catherine A. Lugg, Rutgers University

Bringing together scholarship and examples from practice, this book explores ways in which early childhood curriculum – including classroom practices and community contexts – can more actively engage with a range of social justice issues, democratic principles and anti-oppressive practices. Featuring a stellar list of expert contributors, the chapters in this volume present a cross-section of contemporary issues in childhood education. The text highlights the voices of children, teachers and families as they reflect on everyday experiences related to issues of social justice, inclusion and oppression, as well as ways young children and their teachers engage in activism. Chapters explore curriculum and programs that address justice issues, particularly educating for democracy, and culminate in a focus on the future, offering examples of resistance and visions of hope and possibility. Designed for practitioners, graduate students and researchers in early childhood, this book challenges readers to explore the ways in which early childhood education is – and can be – engaging with social justice and democratic practices.

A path-breaking study of teacher organizing, civil rights movement activism, and urban education, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism recounts how teachers' and activists' ideals shaped the school crisis and placed them at the epicenter of America's racial conflict.

Debates about the regulation of drugs are inseparable from talk of children and the young. Yet how has this association come to be so strong, and why does it have so much explanatory, rhetorical and political force? The premise for this book is that the relationship between drugs and childhood merits more exploration beyond simply pointing out that children and drugs are both ‘things we tend to get worried about’. It asks what is at stake when legislators, lobbyists and decision-makers revert to claims about children in order to sustain a given legal or policy position. Beginning with a genealogy of the relationship between the discursive artefacts of ‘drugs’ and ‘childhood’, the book draws on Foucauldian methodologies to explore how childhood functions as a device in the biopolitical management of drug use(rs) and supply. In addition to analysing decriminalisation initiatives and sentencing measures, it (unusually) reaches beyond the criminal context to consider the significance of the ‘politics of childhood’ for law- and policymaking in the fields of family justice and education. It concludes by arguing that the currency of childhood and ‘youth’ is not reducible to rhetoric; it shapes the discursive entities of drugs and addiction and is one of the ways in which particular substances become socially, culturally and politically intelligible. At the same time, ‘drugs’ serve as a technology of child normalisation. The book will be essential reading for policymakers as well as researchers and students working in the areas of Criminal Justice, Law, Psychology and Sociology.

During the Progressive Era, a rehabilitative agenda took hold of American juvenile justice, materializing as a citizen-and-state-building project and mirroring the unequal racial politics of American democracy itself. Alongside this liberal "manufactory of citizens,” a parallel structure was enacted: a Jim Crow juvenile justice system that endured across the nation for most of the twentieth century. In The Black Child Savers, the first study of the rise and fall of Jim Crow juvenile justice, Geoff Ward examines the origins and organization of this separate and unequal juvenile justice system. Ward explores how generations of “black child-savers” mobilized to challenge the threat to black youth and community interests and how this struggle grew aligned with a wider civil rights movement, eventually forcing the formal integration of American juvenile justice. Ward’s book reveals nearly a century of struggle to build a more democratic model of juvenile justice—an effort that succeeded in part, but ultimately failed to deliver black youth and community to liberal rehabilitative ideals. At once an inspiring story about the shifting boundaries of race, citizenship, and democracy in America and a crucial look at the nature of racial inequality, The Black Child Savers is a stirring account of the stakes and meaning of social justice.

As the conservative political mood of our nation eliminates programs for the increasing numbers of bilingual children, educators are nevertheless expected to teach linguistically and culturally diverse learners with limited background knowledge and resources. This edited volume challenges "mainstream" educators to critically examine how to best meet the needs of bilingual/bicultural children in contemporary America.