Youth, School, and Community

Unlike other books about youth, this book examines how young people’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion are shaped by extended social relations, coordinating thought and conduct across time and space. Working with young people, using a range of participatory institutional ethnographic strategies, this book investigates the social and institutional relations which differentially punctuate our lives. While research began with what young people know and have experienced, this starting place anchors an investigation of public sector institutions and institutional processes that remain implicated in social-historical-economic processes of global capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

Youth, School, and Community connects the dots between the abstract objectified accounts produced by institutions and enabling institutional action and accounting practices, and the actual material conditions of young people’s lives and development, which these accounts obscure. By focusing on specific policies and procedures that produce young people’s experiences of racialized inclusion/exclusion, safety/risk make it particularly useful to academics, professionals, and activists who want to ensure that young people experience equitable access to public sector resources and not disproportionate exposure to public sector punishments and punitive interventions.