Childhood

Research approaches to `youth' and `adolescence' in many disciplines have been shaped by the western construction of adolescence as a period of inevitable `Storm and Stress', although researchers in anthropology and cultural studies have questioned the value of this model. British research on youth cultures and subcultures during the 1970s presented a critique of dominant representations of (particular groups of) young people as `troubled' or `troubling'. The 1980s saw a decline in this work due in part to the rise of the New Right, postmodern critiques of ethnographic research and cuts in social science research funding, especially for radical qualitative studies. The 1990s saw something of a resurgence of radical youth research, and a transformed cultural studies approach remains central to this endeavour. The 1990s also brought the construction of a `new Europe' following the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At the turn of the century, youth research began to engage with theories of globalization and the notion of global youth culture(s). This article discusses the importance of maintaining a critical perspective on these questions, and the possibility of a fruitful debate between globalization theory and youth cultural research. Examples from recent youth studies are considered as possible means of developing a continued critique of the `youth as trouble' paradigm in the context of an engagement with globalization theory.

This article examines constructions of adolescence and pathology and their relation to human service intervention. The author locates a history of discourses of adolescence and pathology along a trajectory of 20th-century capitalism. Particular attention is paid to racialized, gendered and classbased aspects of this history. The historic context sets the stage for a close reading of representations of youth pathology used to market treatment facilities to human service professionals. The author argues that the youth treatment industry may not be preparing adolescents for healthy adulthood but rather for their place in a continuum of care, control and containment.

Public policy discourses with narrow views of morality and character are at the center of contemporary definitions and marketing of services for violent and troubled youths and children, especially in urban, low-income and black schools and communities in the US. This must be disrupted, this article argues, by exposing the role `moral entrepreneurs' play in such practices. Using descriptive and ethnographic data on violence and related troubles in urban and black schools and communities, the author argues that, left undisturbed, moral entrepreneurs pose as much a risk as those children and youths who are causing so much trouble.

Throughout the past decade, calls for experimentation and innovation in children's services have proliferated in the US. The current tide of reform in children's services is linked not only to shifting social welfare structures but also to transformations in conceptions of the nature of childhood and children's needs. Using illustrations from one demonstration project of `wraparound' services, I suggest that these emerging programs may embed notions of children as `complex systems' - ideas that differ significantly from accounts of child development as a linear, staged and goal-oriented progression.

This article uses the multidisciplinary team approach to child sexual abuse as a generative site for research and explores the ways in which shifting meanings of childhood and constructions of sexually abused children and the structuring of team practice poses problems for multidisciplinary team members. It argues that understanding child sexual abuse and developing community-based practice approaches must be informed by broader perspectives. Linkages are drawn between the multidisciplinary team approach and the `businessing' of human services. A model of critical practice is suggested as a framework for considering new translations of practice with sexually abused children.

This article addresses a culturally specific depression-like disorder (nervios) among children living in the southern Ecuadorian Andes. Characterized by symptoms as varied as melancholy and anger, nervios is said to strike when children are separated from their parents, specifically fathers, who commonly migrate to the US. Nervios serves as a generative site for analyzing the local meanings and practices of children and childhood within wider national and global economic processes. Specifically, it is argued that beyond explanations predicated on psychological ideas of separation and attachment, the malady reflects the limits of children's abilities to accept the terms of family life increasingly defined through transnational migration and new consumption practices. Ultimately, this article suggests that nervios aids children by giving voice to life changes they do not completely understand.

In the early 1990s, youth in the US were deemed a generation of `slackers'. Marketing and advertising agencies capitalized upon this mix of concern and blame concerning Generation X. This article explores the ways that these representations reflect changes within and anxieties about the future of the professional-managerial class. I suggest that these images have been also inadvertently shaping the subjectivities of the younger members of this generation. In so doing, they may be helping create the flexible worker that appears to be enabling the capitalist system to regulate itself during contemporary shifts to transnational capitalism.

Today's young Germans are largely seen as either `troublemakers' or apolitical hedonists. These designations are played off each other, sometimes by young people themselves, contributing to a tension between youth subcultures and the civil society around them. In this context, the category of youth seems easy for civic authorities to manipulate, but young people have maintained ways to undermine that control and hold onto their efficacy. This article explores these themes within the context of a Nürnberg youth/community center, discussing its history and relation to the more visible world of `techno' culture.