A comprehensive reader exploring global child and youth studies.

Child and Youth Studies: A Reader is an invaluable tool for instructors and students who take courses on children and youth. This book collects 55 readings across 11 topic sections into a single, legally compliant volume. Edited by Ingrid E. Castro, a sociologist and editor of four prior collected volumes on childhood, this reader spans scholarship from the 1990s through the 2020s.

Organized thematically, the reader covers approaches to child and youth studies, core theories and concepts, methodologies, emotions and bodies, families, education, environments, ethnicities and migration, identities, popular culture and play, and future directions. Each section concludes with five in-class/out-of-class exercises. All included works draw on qualitative and participatory methods featuring diverse authors and children from around the globe.

Readers will also find:

• Research spanning child and youth geographies, socioemotional well-being, peer cultures, caring relationships, sexualities, surveillance, violence, and activism
• Classic and contemporary scholarship selected to represent diverse voices and global perspectives on childhood and youth experiences
• Qualitative and participatory methodologies that foreground children's and young people's own accounts of their lives and social worlds
• Compliance with current copyright and accessible content laws, eliminating the need for instructor-assembled course packets
• Fifty-five exercises designed to extend classroom discussion and deepen student engagement with each thematic section

Designed for undergraduate courses in sociology, child and youth studies, education, anthropology, social work, and child development, this reader provides instructors with a ready-made, thematically organized collection that replaces ad hoc course packets. Child and Youth Studies: A Reader gives students access to foundational and recent scholarship reflecting the global scope of child and youth studies.

This book advances a bold phenomenological foundation for animal legal personhood. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, care ethics, ethology, Indigenous studies, and critical human-animal scholarship, Aubert develops a post-anthropocentric account of animals as embodied, intentional, communicative, and vulnerable agents. The book challenges dominant cognitive and anthropocentric criteria for inclusion in moral and legal communities, proposing instead an ethics grounded in attentiveness, relationality, and embodied communication. Through vivid multispecies encounters, Aubert identifies animals' fundamental interests and preference-based agency, advancing a framework for translating their standpoints into legal institutions. Interweaving analytic clarity with personal reflection, this interdisciplinary study reimagines animal rights, legal subjecthood, and ecological care for the Anthropocene, offering an innovative path forward for law, ethics, and environmental humanities.

Since Tinder's launch in 2012, the app and its iconic swipe have sparked controversy, shaped the matchmaking industry, and changed how people date.

In the first book-length scholarly exploration of Tinder, Stefanie Duguay traces the app's debut, rise to popularity, and the complicated relationship that many people have with it. She examines shifting interpretations of Tinder's purpose - from hook-ups to finding true love - alongside changes in verifying users' authenticity, ensuring safety, and generating revenue. She argues that Tinder's prominence has set the stage for how intimacy operates online. While positive for some users, others experience hostility, which leaves them fielding malicious reporting, harassment, reduced algorithmic visibility, and other challenges in using a technology that has become focal to many people's partner-seeking. Duguay concludes that noticing how these conditions have formed on Tinder enables us to imagine new ways of dating digitally in the future.

Arriving when some have heralded the end of dating apps, this book illuminates how Tinder's legacy will continue to influence dating in the long term. It is essential reading for students and scholars in media and communication studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and anyone who has ever thought of swiping right.

Boundaries and Community is an essential guide for building bridges in a world marked by deep divisions. Across eleven concise chapters, this book offers practical tools and reflective insights for fostering meaningful connections within and across racially, ethnically, politically, and religiously divided communities. Rather than simply describing the problems that fracture our collective lives, it provides a hands-on toolkit for addressing them and empowers readers to move beyond ideological stalemates and take constructive action.

Each chapter tackles a critical challenge of collective life - shared experience, collective responsibility, individual rights and communal belonging, social trust, and more - offering a clear "rule" for action, real-life examples, and thought-provoking questions for group discussion. By modelling a forum for open, community-engaged dialogue, the book equips concerned citizens with strategies to address local issues without resorting to polarized formulas of the right or left.

Boundaries and Community serves as both diagnosis and roadmap, helping readers orient themselves in today's polarized climate and inspiring them to forge new pathways for cooperation and understanding. Whether you are a community leader, organizer, or simply someone who cares about collective well-being, this book provides the tools and inspiration to act together - even with those with whom you fundamentally disagree.

This book provides a social anthropological analysis of how same-sex couples navigate family founding, family disassembling and post-divorce parenting. Offering a collection of 20 personal accounts of lesbian and gay individuals describing how they partnered, became parents-through adoption, gamete donation, gestational surrogacy or co-parenthood-and eventually disassembled their families, the book explores how same-sex couples, in collaboration with relatives, friends, policymakers, and judges, form and transform their parenting while negotiating custody arrangements. Investigating how genetics, law and perpetuity emerge as the central pillars of post-separation same-sex parenting, chapters elucidate foundational issues that span a wide variety of families' dynamics. The book will be of interest to researchers in gender studies, politics and gender, family studies, family law, and social policy as well as to interested lay readers.

For decades, pioneer communities in Silicon Valley and beyond have been at the forefront in shaping our ideas of digital futures, from social media platforms and self-tracking practices to groundbreaking lab initiatives. Their latest frontier, artificial intelligence, is already pushing the imagined boundaries of human potential.

Pioneer Communities is the first book to explore these influential groups and their global impact. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, the book explores the spread of pioneer communities, from the Whole Earth Network and the Maker and Quantified Self movements, to more recent communities such as Ethereum. It uncovers their visions for digital futures, their life cycles, their idea of the world as a lab, and the role of organizational elites in curating their narratives. The book reveals how these communities foster a "quiet futuring" - a process that, though often unseen, profoundly impacts our perceptions of technological advancement.

Rich with concrete examples and surprising insights, Pioneer Communities offers a comprehensive understanding of the groups that influence our future. It is essential reading for students, scholars, journalists, policymakers, and practitioners eager to explore the potential of AI and other digital technologies in shaping our tomorrow.

In modern culture, the term "melodrama" has lost its original meaning. We use it in our everyday assessments of human behaviour; our understanding of melodramatic gestures and behavioural codes now extends far beyond the theatrical environment. Today, we see the melodramatic mode employed in contemporary political discourse, media texts, and militaristic propaganda. What is it about melodrama that attracts a person of the twenty-first century? What explains the genre's remarkable resilience over time?

The essays in this volume examine these questions by focusing on Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet melodrama, applying modern theories of melodrama to the analysis of melodramatic discourse in Russian culture. Russian studies professors Marina Balina and Daisuke Adachi explore new directions in the study of melodramatic discourse and address emerging spheres of mass culture, such as the communicative space of the internet. This collection significantly expands the scope of research: alongside the traditional genres of the melodramatic mode - literature, poetry, and film - the contributors examine melodrama and its deconstructions in interviews, egodocuments, young adult literature, and television series.

The collection offers a historically multifaced but conceptually coherent analysis of melodrama, exposing the roots of its remarkable persistence in Russian culture.

Many criticisms of young people in the West excoriate a self-obsessed, 'snowflake' generation and the indulgent parents and teachers who enable them, cowed by fears of upsetting or alienating the kids. But, as sociologists Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee show, pressure to affirm young people's views of themselves is applied by wider political and cultural dynamics, which corrode organic adult-child relationships. Consequently, young people's ability to develop a rounded, grounded sense of themselves suffers - as does their relationship with the adults who care for them.

The obsession with personal identity incites teenagers and emerging adults to short-circuit the dynamic process of growing up by adopting fashionable badges of self-presentation. But these stymie young people's access to the intimate intergenerational relationships that have historically provided the basis for development into maturity. Older people often find themselves positioned defensively on 'the wrong side of history', while young people's insecurity is intensified by an aggressive focus on the present.

How can we restore strong ties between the generations? In this sensitive, optimistic and ambitiously broad intervention, Bristow and Lee advocate a cultural narrative that supports adults' authority to say 'no' to our children, with love.

Why the idea of English unmusicality arose and how the English sought to uphold national honor in the face of it

Why, while touting their superiority in other spheres, did the English develop an idea of themselves as musically inferior to their neighbors? Historian Amy Dunagin shows that as the English musical marketplace expanded after 1660, evolving beliefs about the effects of climate on national character led the English to identify musicality-along with excess, passion, and effeminacy-as characteristic of a "southern" temperament from which they were eager to distance themselves.

Once established, the idea proved difficult to excise, and the ascendancy of foreign music, especially Italian opera, seemed to confirm it. Eighteenth-century English commentators disagreed about how best to present the state of their national music and developed competing narratives that resonated with Tory, Establishment Whig, and Patriot political ideologies, with profound implications for English cultural identity.

Dunagin traces the idea of English unmusicality as it emerged in the late Stuart period and shows how it became a contested national narrative-one that reflected broader anxieties about identity, virtue, and cultural engagement with Europe.

Large language models are everywhere, from chatbots and search engines to content generators and decision-making systems. But what is actually happening when they 'speak'?

Discourse Machines argues that LLMs are not neutral tools but active producers of meaning, knowledge, and power. Drawing on critical theory, post-structuralism, and discourse analysis, Simon Lindgren situates LLMs within longer traditions of thinking about language, power, and knowledge. Through close readings of interactions with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other systems, he reveals how these machines reproduce truth, perform authority without understanding, simulate care without embodiment, and enact the 'death of the author' while projecting a coherent voice. As these systems become embedded in education, healthcare, journalism, and governance, the stakes could not be higher.

Offering a critical perspective on generative AI, Discourse Machines is essential reading for understanding what happens when language itself is automated, and what we must do to reclaim discourse from the machines.

Founded in 1922, the BBC developed strong connections with Germany from the start, focused particularly on Berlin. The first Director-General of the BBC John Reith, wanted to broadcast 'high' culture to British radio audiences and often selected Berlin orchestral music for the early live performances of the BBC. The BBC in Berlin contributed to British attitudes towards the Third Reich. During the Second World War, the BBC developed its German Service aimed at listeners across German-speaking regions, but with much of the content derived from and focused on Berlin. And after 1945, the BBC set up in the occupied part of the city, becoming a key institution in the cultural politics of the Cold War, both westwards- facing, in transmitting news and features from West Berlin to British and world listeners (and later TV viewers); and also DDR-centred with the continuing activity of the BBC German service. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990 were hugely significant moment for the BBC.As one of the few international cultural institutions that remained in situ in the city throughout the Weimar years, the Third Reich, the era of divided Germany through to reunification and the return of the capital to the city, the BBC is a potentially revealing case-study of how British-German relations changed over time. This collection of essays will create a fuller understanding of how German culture has been presented to English-speaking audiences, and how, conversely, British national identity and memory has been formed by images and stereotypes of Germany.

Digital platforms have become a critical stage for far-right movements in the US.

This book shows how white nationalist networks, including the Alt-Right, exploit the Internet's openness and techno-publicity to spread ideology, organize and maintain visibility online. Analyzing interfaces, website infrastructure and user-generated content, the book reframes online extremism as a product of capitalism as much as ideology. It highlights how platforms and profit structures shape reactionary media.

Offering a bold intervention for critical media studies, this is a call for reimagining the networked public sphere and understanding how technology, power and online politics converge today.

A landmark study of twentieth-century Black picture magazines and their impact on Black American life

From the late 1930s through the early 1970s, national publications such as Our World, Sepia, Color, Elegant, Flash, Brown, and Ebony framed emerging definitions of success for Black middle-class audiences. These magazines featured dynamic photo essays, sometimes by photographers as renowned as Gordon Parks and Moneta Sleet Jr., that shaped perspectives on Black cultural life and influenced the way millions of Americans understood the world through photography.

This history of Black picture magazines and their contribution to American photography, journalism, and cultural production is the first to consider these publications through a visual and scholarly lens. It features more than 250 illustrations, essays by prominent curators and thinkers, and thematic contributions by celebrity experts, including

* Tina Beyonce Knowles, businesswoman and House of Dereon fashion designer, on beauty culture
* Doug Glanville, sports journalist and former MLB player, on sports
* Carla J. Williams, photographer and 2025 Guggenheim fellow, on pulp pinups
* Jason Moran, jazz musician and MacArthur "genius" award-winner, on music
* TAYLOR ALXNDR, activist and performer, on drag and queer/trans representation

With a comprehensive list of Black picture magazines and the photographers whose work appeared in them, this volume will serve as both a foundational reference and a compelling visual history that reveals the profound role these publications played in defining and circulating images of Black life, achievement, and aspiration in the United States.

Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Exhibition Schedule:

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(February 28 to May 31, 2027)

Portland Museum of Art, Maine
(October 8, 2027, to January 9, 2028)

New Orleans Museum of Art
(May 11 to August 6, 2028)

Journalism is valued, contested, and sometimes attacked, because of the role it plays or potentially plays in society. Journalists collectively develop a sense of what social good they provide in the world, partly to provide direction in their daily work and partly to defend their authority in the face of competing visions of what journalism should be and do.

The Social Roles of Journalism explores how journalism's place in the world is in near constant (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. It investigates how journalism's roles have been created, conceived and practiced around the world and why journalists often struggle to perform the roles they value. The book identifies the characteristics, types, and levels of roles - in doing so, it develops a model of how roles are internalized, enacted, reflected upon, normalized, and negotiated. Ultimately, the book intends to bring greater clarity to the broad and often fragmented work on journalistic roles, introducing a novel and integrative theoretical framework on which future research can build.

This book is an essential resource for advanced students and scholars of journalism.

The phrase 'to start an OnlyFans' has become part of internet vernacular, indicating someone who charges fans for access to intimate content. Founded in 2016 as a content subscription platform, OnlyFans rose to prominence during the COVID-19 lockdowns. In a social media landscape where user data typically fuels personalized content, a platform with no advertising that continues to grow in users - and profit - is rare.

In the first book-length examination of its kind, Emily van der Nagel explores the phenomenon of OnlyFans and reveals how intimacy makes it such a compelling and popular platform. Adopting a sex-positive perspective, the book centres the experiences of creators and subscribers while situating OnlyFans as a paid, Not Safe For Work platform within a social media ecology that blocks sexual expression. To understand contemporary social media, van der Nagel argues the practices, cultures, and economies of OnlyFans are an essential part of the picture.

This book is a critical examination of OnlyFans for students and scholars of media and communications studies, and anyone interested in adult content on social media.

The fourth edition of Living Language is fully updated with new perspectives on gender and language revitalization.

Now in its Fourth Edition, Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology continues to ground students in how language both shapes and is shaped by social contexts, cultural meanings, and power dynamics. Fully updated throughout, this fourth edition covers both theory and real-world interaction, frontloading with a robust conceptual framework and equipping readers to interpret the chapters that follow.

New to this edition are discussions of AI in relation to literacy, updated coverage of transgender language research and pronouns, and a perspectival shift from language endangerment to language shift grounded in Native and Indigenous linguistic anthropologists' perspectives. The text now explicitly addresses scale as a concept and highlights differences between Internet and cellular-based communication.

This insightful and indispensable book offers:

• Sign language scholarship integrated throughout the entire text rather than confined to a single chapter, reflecting current disciplinary approaches
• Cartoons, data tables, and relatable examples of actual language use illustrating linguistic anthropology's relevance in a globalized world
• A unified theoretical framework rooted in social theory covering language ideologies, multifunctionality, practice, and indexicality across chapters
• An accessible yet rigorous presentation that treats language as a non-neutral form of social action without oversimplifying core concepts
• A new appendix providing examples of classroom activities that can help instructors teach and students explore the key concepts of the book.

Living Language is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistic anthropology, language and culture, and language and society, as well as related courses in sociolinguistics, sociology, education, and communication. Its accessible yet theoretically grounded approach enables students to analyze language as social action across diverse cultural contexts.

A revelatory history of the Native American activists who reshaped international politics-building international alliances, redefining sovereignty, and laying the foundation for today's global Indigenous rights movement

This book uncovers the pivotal yet long-overlooked story of how Native American activists reshaped international conversations on sovereignty, human rights, and Indigenous self-determination during the transformative decade of the 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research and new oral histories, Jennifer R. O'Neal reveals how Native leaders built powerful alliances across borders, international organizations, and Indigenous nations to confront centuries of erasure and reclaim their place on the world stage.

Set against the backdrop of the Red Power movement, evolving federal Indian policy, and the rise of Cold War human rights politics, this groundbreaking study traces the work of key organizations-including the International Indian Treaty Council, the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Brotherhood, and the World Council of Indigenous Peoples-as they navigated shifting political landscapes to influence both domestic and global policy.

Through a lens of Indigenous relationality and resurgence, O'Neal demonstrates how activists

* reframed sovereignty as a living practice rooted in land, culture, and community, and
* resisted settler-colonial political constraints while forging new pathways toward justice.

Illuminating a defining era of Indigenous political innovation, O'Neal brings this history out of the shadows-honoring the activists who envisioned a different future and built the foundations of today's global Indigenous rights movement.

The governance of queer migration and asylum in Europe has been shaped by colonial legacies of racial, sexual, and gendered othering. Central to these legacies is the demand - reproduced in humanitarianism and beyond - that queer migrants render their private lives visible to receive hospitality, recognition or care.

Engaging an unruly archive of film, documentary, photography and performance art, this book explores narratives that refuse or complicate this demand for visibility. Arguing that listening to hauntings and other absences can reveal novel insights into the politics of visibility, the book contributes to debates across border studies, queer theory and postcolonial studies.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This book provides a critical reflection on the relationship between education, conflict, war and peace and the global actors and practitioners that have devised strategies to engage and support education systems in conflict-affected contexts.

Exploring a wide range of issues from development assistance to education, peacebuilding, de-radicalisation programmes and global governance, it evidences the challenges and the promises of education's complex relationship to war and peace. The book highlights the field's entanglements with geopolitics and imperial interventions, which have shaped its actions and undermined and limited its potential to support social transformation towards peace with social justice.