Youth & Society

This study examines how the concept of the “lost voice” functions in religious circles. Thirty females (divided into three age groups: ages 8 to 10, ages 12 to 14, and ages 20 to 30, equally distributed between a conservative church and an egalitarian church) were interviewed. Results indicated that the younger girls from both churches report sacrificing themselves and their opinions to maintain relationships. Furthermore, the adult women from the egalitarian church evidenced a regaining of their voices and perceived this as a newly found strength. Adult women from the conservative church also evidenced a regaining of their voices and yet perceived this as a weakness.

Investigating the conditions that foster organized expressions of power and the circumstances that students exploit to engage in political, collective forms of resistance warrants researchers' serious attention. Inner-city schools are uniquely situated as changing demographics and global and national migration continue to reconstruct schools as host sites of identity politics. In this article, the authors investigate the sites of inner-city schools where contests over identity are waged. Their findings indicate that the experience of being African American in the neighborhood school, where students feel stuck “back here,” is vastly different from the experience of being African American in the citywide school where the all African American population feels a part of its cultural community and the wider society. Denied equality and difference in both school settings, students from the same neighborhood and students from various neighborhoods demand their equal rights with varying degrees of intensity.

This article explores how the connections between women educators and female students can be critical for the development of a liberating resistance in both. The author addresses the loss of self-esteem, voice, and authority in girls documented in recent research and then reports on a retreat process designed for women educators in Shaker Heights, Ohio and in Boston, Massachusetts. These retreat experiences build community and promote resistance to the educational and cultural messages that silence the voices and negate the knowledge of girls and women. This work has resulted in changes in relationships and educational practice with girls and women colleagues. Thus by fostering healthy resistance, this work with women educators serves as a political intervention in the education of girls.

Recently, a new style of youthful graffiti has emerged in cities throughout the United States and beyond. Based on 4 years of fieldwork inside the Denver, Colorado graffiti underground, and on field and document research in other U.S. and European cities, this article explores the many ways in which those who produce this graffiti resist the increasing segregation and control of urban environments and shows how participants in the graffiti underground undermine the efforts of legal and political authorities to control them. Finally, it documents the ways in which this collective production of graffiti not only confronts and resists existing arrangements but constructs alternative social, cultural, and economic arrangements as well.

Six hundred ten German and 610 Russian adolescents in three age groups—12, 15, and 18 years—were given a questionnaire assessing their environmental awareness. In both nationalities, anxiety, sadness, and anger about environmental destruction were high, but hopelessness was rejected. Willingness to engage in pro-environmental behavior was also quite strong. German adolescents had stronger feelings and were more willing to engage in personal pro-environmental behavior than were Russians. However, their level of environmental awareness decreased with age. Females of both nationalities had higher levels of environmental awareness than did males; this difference was more pronounced from age 15. Environmental feelings and behavioral tendencies were highly correlated. Differences between culture groups were explained in terms of different societal backgrounds.