Books in the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies series

Explores how ex-combatants and other post-war youth negotiated a depleted and difficult social and cultural landscape in the years following Liberia's fourteen-year bloody civil war. Unlike others who study child soldiers, Abby Hardgrove's ethnography looks at both former combatants and also the youth who were not recruited to fight.

In an adult-dominated society, teenagers are often shut out of participation in politics. This title offers an account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.

Drawing from ethnographic data and research in immigrant communities, this study provides the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children's contributions as translators.

Follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. This title shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights.

A provocative work that will prompt a thorough reevaluation of the culture of secondary education, Defining Student Success shows how different schools, promoting modified versions of larger cultural ideas of success, foster distinct understandings of what it takes to succeed--understandings that do more to reproduce a socioeconomic status quo than to promote upward mobility.

The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a surge in the publication and popularity of autobiographical writings about childhood. Linking literary and cultural studies, Drawing on trauma and memory studies and theories of authorship and readership, this title offers commentary on the triumphs, trials, and tribulations that have shaped this genre.

Examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women's lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience. Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, thematically-arranged essays and case studies illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls' lives across culture and region.

Whether First Communion or bar mitzvah, religious traditions play a central role in the lives of American children. This book presents a collection of essays that reveal how various religions interpret and mediate their traditions to help guide children and their parents in navigating the opportunities and challenges of American life.

Armies of the Young argues against the assumption that child soldiers are simply a hideous manifestation of adult criminal exploitation. Using specific examples it shows how children are not always passive victims, but often make rational decisions that the one thing worse than fighting is not fighting. It urges a reconsideration of the issue.

Shows the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. This title presents an account of how African American girls negotiate schools and neighborhoods governed by the so-called 'code of the street' - the form of street justice that governs violence in distressed urban areas.

In Zambia, due to the rise of TB and the connected HIV epidemic, a large number of children have experienced the illness or death of at least one parent. This study examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realise that children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill and demonstrates why understanding children's care is crucial for global health policy.

Cosmopolitanism - the genuine appreciation of cultural and racial diversity - is often associated with adult worldliness and sophistication. Yet, as this innovative new book suggests, children growing up in multicultural environments might be the most cosmopolitan group of all.

The author's 46 interviews with the families of children with chronic illness gives an understanding of how the children comprehend their illnesses and how parents struggle daily to care for their kids while trying to give them a ""normal"" childhood.

Focuses on the girls' experiences of violence and the inequities of the criminal justice system. Offering a critical assessment of what she describes as a gender-insensitive juvenile justice system, the author takes us inside female detention centers and explores the worlds of those who are incarcerated.

Today, approximately 1.6 million American children live in what social scientists call ""grandfamilies" - households in which children are being raised by their grandparents. In You've Always Been There for Me, Rachel Dunifon uses data gathered from grandfamilies in New York to analyse their unique strengths and distinct needs.

In industrialized democracies, a broad consensus developed that children should not work, but rather learn and play in settings designed and built with these specific purposes in mind. Here, the authors extract common threads in children's understandings of their material worlds, and show how the experience of modernity varies for young people.

Increasingly, educational researchers and policy-makers are finding that extracurricular programmes make a major difference in the lives of disadvantaged youth. Why Afterschool Matters closely follows ten Mexican American students who attended the same extracurricular programme in California, then chronicles its long-term effects on their lives, from eighth grade to early adulthood.

Focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez situates girls' relationships with parents who fail to live up to parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time and contribute to the girls' drug use and involvement in the justice system.

From the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality.

Trafficked children are portrayed by the media - and even by child welfare specialists - as hapless victims who are forced to migrate from a poor country to the United States, where they serve as sex slaves. But as Elzbieta M. Gozdziak reveals in Trafficked Children in the United States, the picture is far more complex.