Critical Youth Research Articles

A Critical Examination of an Urban-Based Youth Empowerment Strategy: The Teen Empowerment Program

ABSTRACT Youths from marginalized and disenfranchised communities can be empowered to advocate for social justice through civic engagement and sociopolitical action. Examining youth empowerment programs, using critical social theory, builds upon our understanding of sociopolitical systems and oppression and provides a lens to examine mechanisms of change while applying theory to practice. Jennings, Parra-Medina, Messias, and McLoughlin (2006) have identified six dimensions of critical youth empowerment programs, which provide a framework for examining youth empowerment programs. This article presents the Teen Empowerment program, as implemented with high-risk youths in urban communities, and examines it along these six dimensions and provides a model for how to critically examine youth empowerment programs using this framework.

Representing youth: methodological issues in critical youth studies

AcknowledgmentsIntroductionAmy L. BestPart I Framing Youth: De?nitional Boundaries and Ambiguities1 Across a Great Gulf? Rebecca Raby2 Label Jars Not PeopleMarc Flacks3 Grow 'em StrongMichael Ungar4 A Roof over Their HeadYvonne VissingPart II From the Field: Adults in Youth Worlds5 With a Capital G: Gatekeepers and Gatekeeping in Research with Children Madeline Leonard6 Will the Least-Adult Please Stand Up? Life as Older Sister Katy in a Taiwanese Elementary School Kathryn Gold Hadley7 The Outsider Lurking Online: Adults Researching Youth Cybercultures Alyssa Richman8 Racing Age: Re?ections on Antiracist Research with Teenage Girls Jessica Karen Taft9 What If a Guy Hits on You?: Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, and Age in Fieldwork with Adolescents C. J. PascoePart III Activating Youth: Youth Agency, Collaboration, and Representation10 Trouble on Memory Lane: Adults and Self-Retrospection in Researching Youth Sari Knopp Biklen11 Power-Puff Ethnography/Guerrilla Research: Children as Native Anthropologists Elizabeth Chin12 Performing Youth: Youth Agency and the Production of Knowledge in Community-Based Theater Stephani Etheridge Woodson13 Beyond Straight Interpretations: Researching Queer Youth Digital Video Susan DriverAbout the Contributors Index

Publishing "Equinox": Broadening Notions of Urban Youth Development after School

This ethnographic, instrumental case study (Stake 2003) of an atypical youth apprenticeship draws on sociocultural and critical theoretical lenses. Findings reveal that during an eight‐month cycle, a paid apprenticeship provided a fertile context for 20 low‐income, ethnically diverse, older youths to explore, reflect upon, compose, photograph, and ultimately publish their communities and worlds. These findings point toward a potential to deepen and broaden the theoretical perspective through which mainstream youth development is conceived. The author argues that adults' guided participation and youths' systematic engagement with multimodal literacies as identity work is a successful recipe for promoting critical youth development'a notion of youth development that not only acknowledges but also encourages youths' reflection on the intersection of race, class, gender, and power.

Review of Critical youth studies: A Canadian focus. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada

Review of Critical youth studies: A Canadian focus. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada

Toward a Critical Social Theory of Youth Empowerment

SUMMARY This article contributes to the development of a critical social theory of youth empowerment which emphasizes collective efforts to create sociopolitical change. It draws upon analysis of four youth empowerment models, and upon findings from a participatory research study which identified key dimensions of critical youth empowerment: (1) a welcoming, safe environment, (2) meaningful participation and engagement, (3) equitable power-sharing between youth and adults, (4) engagement in critical reflection on interpersonal and sociopolitical processes, (5) participation in sociopolitical processes to affect change, and (6) integrated individual- and community-level empowerment. It concludes with discussion of the measurement of outcomes, and the challenges and opportunities for empowerment in youth organization.

Adolescent Sexual Orientation and Suicide Risk: Evidence From a National Study

Sexual orientation has been a debated risk factor for adolescent suicidality over the past 20 years. This study examined the link between sexual orientation and suicidality, using data that are nationally representative and that include other critical youth suicide risk factors. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were examined. Survey logistic regression was used to control for sample design effects. There is a strong link between adolescent sexual orientation and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The strong effect of sexual orientation on suicidal thoughts is mediated by critical youth suicide risk factors, including depression, hopelessness, alcohol abuse, recent suicide attempts by a peer or a family member, and experiences of victimization. The findings provide strong evidence that sexual minority youths are more likely than their peers to think about and attempt suicide.

The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City

What factors lay behind the rehabilitation of central city districts across the world? Set against the contexts of international transformations in a post-industrial postmodern society, this book examines the creation and self-creation of a new middle class of professional and managerial workers associated with the process of gentrification. These are amongst the privileged members in the growing polarisation of urban society. The book examines their impact on central housing markets, retailing and leisure spaces in the inner city. Taking as its focus six large canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the boureois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetisation of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparitive study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts.

The new middle class and the remaking of the central city

What factors lay behind the rehabilitation of central city districts across the world? Set against the contexts of international transformations in a post-industrial postmodern society, this book examines the creation and self-creation of a new middle class of professional and managerial workers associated with the process of gentrification. These are amongst the privileged members in the growing polarisation of urban society. The book examines their impact on central housing markets, retailing and leisure spaces in the inner city. Taking as its focus six large canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the boureois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetisation of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparitive study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts.

Dependence of fatigue crack propagation characteristics on crystallographic orientation. A study using Fe-3Si-grain-oriented specimens: Themelis, G.A. Diss. Abstr. Int. June 1991 51, (12), 281 pp

Critical youth work is based on a dual focus, on individual psychosocial development on the one hand, and collective critical consciousness and the promotion of social justice on the other. Although in practice, critical youth work is gaining popularity as an alternative to person-centered youth work, the theoretical and empirical literature has not kept pace. This paper proposes a theory based practice model that expands the vocabulary of critical youth work. The model is grounded in the work of an innovative Israeli intervention program for marginalized youth and in poststructuralist theories. The model comprised of a three dimensions: the streets as a physical and political place, the use of counter narrative, and the role the youth workers take as social capital agents.