Children, Youth and Environments

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 20 No. 1 (Spring 2010) ISSN: 1546-2250 Telling Young Lives: Portraits of Global Youth Jeffrey, Craig and Dyson, Jane (2008). Philadelphia: Temple University Press; 220 pages. ISBN 9781592139309 (hardback) 9781592139316 (paperback). Telling Young Lives provides clever, original and unpretentious insights on global youth, based on the exploration of memories, daily routines and expectations of 13 young people worldwide. Two professors in Geography from the University of Washington, developing research especially on youth inNorth India, edit the book and pen the introduction and two chapters. A group of experts involved in qualitative research in different regions of the world each contribute small chapters that draw a portrait of a young person they met in their research. A foreword by Katharyne Mitchell and an explorative synthesis of the 13 narratives by Chris Phalo and Kate Swanson complete this collection. In the “global South,” we are guided through the lives of: a teenage girl managing family, work and school duties in a rural community in the Indian Himalayas (chapter 2); a South African young man going around between his temporary jobs, political affairs and various girlfriends (chapter 4); a young worker building walls to protect rich people’s houses after he was involved in the long-term civil war in Sierra Leone (chapter 10); a college student in North India who is leading political movements after spending his adolescence producing footballs (chapter 11); and a long-term female activist from Tanzania, leading a women’s developmental organization (chapter 12). From the “global North,” we meet: a homeless boy surviving in the streets of New York (chapter 3); an English “lad” who is trying to retain his musical dreams while working in a sequence of “McJobs” in Sheffield (chapter 5); a Scottish Muslim young man combining his religious work with his scientific studies (chapter 6); a teenage boy from Eastern Germany, preparing a stable live on his own in the 341 face of the unstable job market in which her single mother is immersed (chapter 7); a boy in probatory status, striking out to clean up his life with his ex-addict mother in a poor neighborhood in San Diego, California (chapter 8); a middle-class Bosnian young man, formerly displaced by the war and trying to settle back into his life in his birth-town, where he is leading an NGO project (chapter 9); a Norwegian middle-class girl, mixing her father’s British and working-class background with global “black culture” to define her own identity (chapter 12); and a young, deaf and lesbian English girl dealing with triple stigmatization (chapter 13). Despite each chapter being drawn from a different research project, a common theoretical framework guides all authors: they focus on how young people manage their identity and their daily lives, dealing simultaneously with local, national and global pressures and changes, and actually taking part in the social and political issues affecting their communities. Involving academics in public debates, especially raising awareness of the experiences and perspectives of disadvantaged youth most affected by neoliberal policies is an explicit goal of this book. Assuming the legacy of feminist theories and Birmingham Contemporary Cultural Studies, the authors aim to present an alternative to the morally negative and politically passive visions of youth spread by the media and by global organizations such as the World Bank. As the editors argue in the introduction, these institutions often use snapshots of young people, neglecting the historical and structural forces that shape their lives, in order to promote the institutions’ own political agendas. The book is readable for very different audiences as it aims to go beyond the academy walls and pervade public debates. The topic, the methodology, and the language of the book make it also appropriate for engaging students in sociology, anthropology and other social sciences all over the world. In line with recent studies (e.g., Katz 2004; Nilan and Feixa 2006), the present collection is innovative, particularly due to its main focus on individual biographies and daily lives and how they are shaped by structural forces. Analysis of the social experiences and 3 perspectives of a single person allows us to go beyond stereotypes and common sense...