Melissa Brough explores how youth-centered forms of civic and cultural engagement in Medellín, Colombia, create networks of change that have the possibility to transform and democratize cities around the world.

Does youth participation hold the potential to change entrenched systems of power and to reshape civic life? In Youth Power in Precarious Times Melissa Brough examines how the city of Medellín, Colombia, offers a model of civic transformation forged in the wake of violence and repression. She responds to a pressing contradiction in the world at large, where youth political participation has become a means of commodifying digital culture amid the ongoing disenfranchisement of youth globally. Brough focuses on how young people's civic participation online and in the streets in Medellín was central to the city's transformation from having the world's highest homicide rates in the early 1990s to being known for its urban renaissance by the 2010s. Seeking to distinguish commercialized digital interactions from genuine political participation, Brough uses Medellín's experiences with youth participation—ranging from digital citizenship initiatives to the voices of community media to the beats of hip-hop culture—to show how young people can be at the forefront of fostering ecologies of artistic and grassroots engagement in order to reshape civic life.

This book examines the social construction and representation of ‘youth on the move’ in the context of the migration process, using El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as a case study to reinterpret the immigration process under the frameworks of coloniality and epistemologies of the South. The discussion surrounding Central American migrants has increased exponentially with the emergence of the caravans and the increased security measures along Mexican and US borders. Explicitly focused on the plight of children and young people, the examination of migration includes exploring the global context and dynamics that influence migratory trends and framing Central American migrant processes and youth strategies of survival and resistance. Contributing to existing conversations about the migration of people from Central America, this text seeks to understand the phenomenon’s roots. This book will interest scholars and students across the social sciences, particularly those studying the global dynamics of power, and migration and governance, as well as practitioners involved in decision-making with governments and international organizations.

This book is an original study of the youth organizations in London, Toronto, and Vancouver that offer creative and arts programs mainly to youth from diverse and socially marginalized backgrounds. It describes a sector that is often not recognized, organizations that don't like being institutionalized, forms of education that exist outside the mainstream, types of aesthetic expression that often go unrecognized, and unusual learning and cultural opportunities for socially marginalized young people. Rooted in the history of community arts movements from the 1970s, Youthsites, or the non-formal youth arts learning sector, is now part of cities around the world. Technological change, shifts in educational discourses, changes in policy rhetorics, including a turn away from traditional public institutions and a decline in funding of formal public schooling have all impacted the growth of youth arts organizations. Yet there are to date no systematic studies of the history, structure, and development of this sector. Youthsites: Histories of Creativity, Care, and Learning in the City fills this gap and is the first book to develop an internationally comparative, evidence-based, structural analysis of the development of the youth arts sector. Based on an original 4-year study examining the history, priorities, and tensions within this sector between 1995 and 2015, Youthsites explores the organizations and people who are helping young people to become creators, citizens, or just themselves in times of austerity, crisis, and change. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

This book draws on a wealth of evidence including young people’s own stories, to document how they are now faring in increasingly unequal societies like America, Britain, Australia, France and Spain. It points to systematic generational inequality as those born since 1980 become the first generation to have a lower standard of living than previous generations. While governments and experts typically explain this by referring to globalization, new technologies, or young people’s deficits, the authors of this book offer a new political economy of generations, which identifies the central role played by governments promoting neoliberal policies that exacerbate existing social inequalities based on age, ethnicity, gender and class. The book is a must read for social science students, human service workers and policy-makers and indeed for anyone interested in understanding the impact of government policy over the last 40 years on young people.

‘Young People and Social Media: Contemporary Children’s Digital Culture’ explores the practices, relationships, consequences, benefits, and outcomes of children’s experiences with, on, and through social media by bringing together a vast array of different ideas about childhood, youth, and young people’s lives. These ideas are drawn from scholars working in a variety of disciplines, and rather than just describing the social construction of childhood or an understanding of children’s lives, this collection seeks to encapsulate not only how young people exist on social media but also how their physical lives are impacted by their presence on social media. One of the aims of this volume in exploring youth interaction with social media is to unpack the structuring of digital technologies in terms of how young people access the technology to use it as a means of communication, a platform for identification, and a tool for participation in their larger social world. During longstanding and continued experience in the broad field of youth and digital culture, we have come to realize that not only is the subject matter increasing in importance at an immeasurable rate, but the amount of textbooks and/or edited collections has lagged behind considerably. There is a lack of sources that fully encapsulate the canon of texts for the discipline or the rich diversity and complexity of overlapping subject areas that create the fertile ground for studying young people’s lives and culture. The editors hope that this text will occupy some of that void and act as a catalyst for future interdisciplinary collections. ‘Young People and Social Media: Contemporary Children’s Digital Culture’ will appeal to undergraduate students studying Child and Youth Studies and—given the interdisciplinary nature of the collection— scholars, researchers and students at all levels working in anthropology, psychology, sociology, communication studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and human rights, among others. Practitioners in these fields will also find this collection of particular interest.

In Precarious Times, Anne Fuchs explores how works of German literature, film, and photography reflect on the profound temporal anxieties precipitated by contemporary experiences of atomization, displacement, and fragmentation that bring about a loss of history and of time itself and that is peculiar to our current moment. The digital age places premiums on just-in-time deliveries, continual innovation, instantaneous connectivity, and around-the-clock availability. While some celebrate this 24/7 culture, others see it as profoundly destructive to the natural rhythm of day and night—and to human happiness. Have we entered an era of a perpetual present that depletes the future and erodes our grasp of the past? Beginning its examination around 1900, when rapid modernization was accompanied by comparably intense reflection on changing temporal experience, Precarious Times provides historical depth and perspective to current debates on the "digital now." Expanding the modern discourse on time and speed, Fuchs deploys such concepts as attention, slowness and lateness to emphasize the uneven quality of time around the world.