Children's Studies books

Sustainability has become a core concept in considering tourism planning and development. Existing literature on sustainable tourism suggests that tourism will become more sustainable if all stakeholders participate in the tourism development process. Children in Sustainable and Responsible Tourism seeks to fill an absence of research in the sustainable and responsible tourism field involving children as stakeholders. Children in Sustainable and Responsible Tourism argues that children’s empowerment should be a core component of any responsible tourism initiatives, and that children’s involvement and support should be a requirement in helping to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hugues Séraphin’s ground-breaking study directly addresses the issue that academic researchers and industry practitioners alike have overlooked and under evaluated the significance of this key segment for the industry. Chapters address issues related to both the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of empowering children to be responsible tourists and potential future industry practitioners while providing recommendations for current industry professionals.

Over the past half of a century, Chinese societies have undergone a tremendous amount of social, political, and economic change, which have also been a catalyst for substantial shifts in fundamental structures and processes within Chinese families. This edited collection focuses on the continuities and changes in gender and intergenerational relations of Chinese families in Greater China.  Paying close attention to families in Greater China, including the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the authors address a wide array of topics, including marriage patterns, cohabitation, rural-urban variations in family structures, fertility aspirations, spousal relationships and marital quality, and more. Collectively, the chapters point to the dynamic, diverse, and evolving nature of Chinese families, and also provide considerable insight into their future trajectories.

This volume assembles cutting edge research focusing on media and youth. The volume looks broadly at what is understood by the definitions of 'youth' and 'media', when studied together and separately, and how these continue to develop. The volume features papers about institutions that shape this part of the lifecourse, such as the family, school, community organizations. Papers address this theme from a theoretical and methodological framework.

Fake News in Digital Cultures presents a new approach to understanding disinformation and misinformation in contemporary digital communication, arguing that fake news is not an alien phenomenon undertaken by bad actors, but a logical outcome of contemporary digital and popular culture, conceptual changes meaning and truth, and shifts in the social practice of trust, attitude and creativity. Looking not to the problems of the present era but towards the continuing development of a future digital media ecology, the authors explore the emergence of practices of deliberate disinformation. This includes the circulation of misleading content or misinformation, the development of new technological applications such as the deepfake, and how they intersect with conspiracy theories, populism, global crises, popular disenfranchisement, and new practices of regulating misleading content and promoting new media and digital literacies. 

How do children and youth create, negotiate, change spaces and places, and assert their rights to space? Taking a socio-spatial approach, this international collection based on empirical research examines how space relates to and informs the social construction of children and youth. Examining the spaces used by children and youth in many different contexts, including neighbourhoods, community centres, schools, public streets, the natural environment, orphanages, early education classrooms, homes, borders, this collection exists at the intersection of the new sociology of childhoods and new materialism.  Rethinking Young People's Lives Through Space and Place explores three main themes, how children navigate real and imaginary borders, how space constitutes belonging, meaning-making, and representation, and how space informs learning and identities.

The ebook version of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and is freely available to read online.  This book presents how young children's current practices when playing with tablets inform digital experiences in Denmark and Japan. Through an interdisciplinary lens and a grounded theory approach, Fróes identifies and maps these practices, which compose the taxonomy of tablet play and proposes a series of theoretical concepts that complement recent theories related to play and digital literacy studies.   Tablet devices bring with them not only a multitude of options, but they also help create notions of digital space and environments defining emerging territories in young children's play experiences. Young children play with these devices and have fun indulging in digital worlds, while discovering and problem-solving with a variety of narratives and interfaces encountered on these digital playgrounds. A set of tablet play characteristics, such as multimodal applications (apps) combined with tablets' physical and digital affordances shape children's digital play.  The data collected through observations informed some noteworthy aspects, including how children's hands gain and perform an embodied knowledge of digital spaces. This embodied knowledge develops through digital play interactions, defining what is proposed as digital penmanship. Complementary to the penmanship, several symbols and a range of modes of use shape a rich multimodal semiotic vocabulary in children's digital play experiences. These early digital experiences set the rules for the playgrounds and assert digital tablets as twenty-first-century toys, shaping young children's playful literacy.

The existential exclusion of youths from the mainframe of the current global order is an increasingly pressing issue. Research to date has proven youths struggle to survive and be relevant within current systemic and institutional arrangements, resulting in a major existential and generational problem. One of two volumes filling a gap in the literature in understanding and responding to this grand challenge, this edited collection focuses particularly on contexts of economic, educational and governance concerns that confront youths, the complex consequences of these issues, their experience of exclusion, and sustainable pathways forward. Addressing youth issues from around the world, Youth Exclusion and Empowerment in the Contemporary Global Order engages with practical, pragmatic, intellectual and policy perspectives. Delving into the lived experiences of young people in many countries, the chapters bring together a rich collection of research from diverse methodologies. Revealing how young people appear trapped, strategically excluded, and helplessly frustrated by the supposedly supportive institutional frameworks of society, the authors tackle this question: how can young people become empowered and socially active in this context? The original materials, literature and data collated across both volumes of Youth Exclusion and Empowerment in the Contemporary Global Order, addressing policy and practice issues for youth, present a cutting edge and innovative major contribution to the field of global youth studies.

The existential exclusion of youths from the mainframe of the current global order is an increasingly pressing issue. Research to date has proven youths struggle to survive and be relevant within current systemic and institutional arrangements, resulting in a major existential and generational problem. The second of two volumes filling a gap in the literature in understanding and responding to this grand challenge, this edited collection focuses particularly on the impact and complex consequences of migration, youth experiences and the functioning of digital spaces, and the shaping of youth identity through exposure to both. Addressing youth issues from around the world, Youth Exclusion and Empowerment in the Contemporary Global Order engages with practical, pragmatic, intellectual and policy perspectives. Delving into the lived experiences of young people in many countries, the chapters bring together a rich collection of research from diverse methodologies. Revealing how young people appear trapped, strategically excluded, and helplessly frustrated by the supposedly supportive institutional frameworks of society, the authors tackle this question: how can young people become empowered and socially active in this context? The original materials, literature and data collated across both volumes of Youth Exclusion and Empowerment in the Contemporary Global Order, addressing policy and practice issues for youth, present a cutting edge and innovative major contribution to the field of global youth studies.

The point of leaving care has been identified as a potentially critical turning point at which services might moderate later outcomes. While there is growing evidence identifying social support and identity development as crucial elements, there remains a gap in the understanding of the care-leaving process from the perspective of young people. Youth Transitions Out of State Care: Being Recognized as Worthy of Care, Respect, and Support presents a newly developed theoretical framework for understanding this process. Supported by research from a qualitative longitudinal study of leaving state care at the age of 18, Dr. Natalie Glynn presents an intimate account of the personal circumstances and structural elements influencing the transitions of rural and urban young people in Ireland using three illustrative cases that break new ground by centering on the voices of young people and their distinct yet interconnected experiences. Pulling together agentic and structural elements in the transition to explain how young people’s choices and reactions are influenced by their personal journeys and socio-cultural contexts, Glynn creates a new theoretical framework that social workers and researchers can use to comprehend this transition period when working with care leavers. Utilizing Ireland as a case study of the increasingly prevalent model of aftercare provision, Youth Transitions Out of State Care: Being Recognized as Worthy of Care, Respect, and Support details broad policy implications and presents an opportunity to understand how this approach to supporting care leavers works in practice.