The Rutgers University Press Book Series is the first multidisciplinary book series in Childhood Studies. The book series, edited by Myra Bluebond-Langner, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, provides a major opportunity for the Center and University to shape this new field. The purpose of this series is to increase understanding of children and childhood experiences in the United States and abroad. The series reflects the current view of children and approaches to the study of childhood. Authors come from a variety of fields including: anthropology, criminal justice, history, literature, psychology, religion, and sociology. Books address not only to a scholarly audience, but also to those directly responsible for ministering to children's needs and formulating policies affecting their lives and futures. >>> Instructions for Authors

Peter B. Pufall is a professor of psychology at Smith College and co-editor with Harry Beilin of Piaget's Theory: Prospects and Possibilities. Richard P. Unsworth is a senior fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College where he was dean of the chapel and a professor of religion.

Vietnam's Children in a Changing World
Rachel Burr
Publication Date: Fall 2006

Using ethnographic material gathered on the streets of Vietnam, from international aid agencies, orphanages, reform schools and Vietnamese governmental organizations, Rachel Burr explores the complex lives of children who work and live on the streets in urban Vietnam. Arguing against the pervasive Western bias that undergirds the work of many international aid agencies, demonstrates how economic imperatives and Vietnamese cultural emphasis on work and filial obligation draw Vietnamese children to street work.

Rachel Burr is a lecturer in childhood studies at the Centre for Childhood, Development and Learning at The Open University, London, UK.

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Vietnam_s_Children_in_a_Changing_World_2548.html#3643

Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, Contested Citizenship in London, 1870-1918
Lydia Murdoch
Publication Date: Winter 2006

Imagined Orphans explores the discrepancy between the representation and reality of  children’s experiences within welfare institutions in Victorian London. Reformers portrayed children who resided in institutions as either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents, much like Oliver Twist, the archetypal workhouse child. Imagined Orphans demonstrates that most institutionalized children had at least one living parent, that parents turned to welfare services as solutions to short-term crises rather than as permanent depositories for children, and that many parents struggled to maintain contact with their children during the period of institutionalization. The book documents the place of the poor in Victorian welfare practices and the contested, class-based nature of citizenship in the late nineteenth century.

Lydia Murdoch is an assistant professor history at Vassar College.

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Imagined_Orphans_2643.html#3822

Girls in Trouble with the Law
Laurie Schaffner
Publication Date: Summer 2006

Girls in Trouble with the Law takes us to the heart of life for adolescent girls in secure juvenile facilities across the United States. In bringing the voices of court-involved young women into the public conversation about youth crime, adolescent sexuality, and community violence, Laurie Schaffner’s vibrant ethnography offers new views of youth experiences with racism, poverty, violence, and sexuality as well as a critique of the ways gender and justice are produced in the juvenile legal system.

Winner of the Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Children and Youth

Laurie Schaffner is an associate professor in the criminal justice and sociology department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her previous books include Teenage Runaways: Broken Hearts and "Bad Attitudes".

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Girls_in_Trouble_with_the_Law_2549.html#3645

Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America
Susan A. Miller
Publication Date: September 2007

Cookies and camping may be the first things that spring to mind when Americans think about Girl Scouting, but in this history of girls’ organizations, Miller shows that much greater issues were at stake. At the turn of the twentieth century, experts identified adolescence as a new and potentially perilous life-stage. If not properly navigated, they argued, female adolescence threatened the health of the individual, the integrity of the family, and even the welfare of the State. In the midst of these dire predictions, girls’ organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls, the Girl Pioneers, offered a different vision. Growing Girls explores leaders’ efforts to create a modern conception of girlhood that would help girls redefine their relationships to their American heritage, their families, and their own bodies.

Susan A. Miller is an undergraduate advisor and lecturer in history and women's studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Growing_Girls_890.html

Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and Material Culture of Children

Marta Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith, editors
Publication Date: Winter 2007

In this volume, historians, ethnographers, geographers, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects associated with children historically and in the present day. They consider parks, playgrounds, schools, houses, computer games, dolls and pacifiers. The volume also explores children’s points of view about the spaces, buildings, and objects they use and create in the modern world. As the authors extract common threads in children’s understandings of the material world, they also attend to how the experience of modernity varies for children across time, through space, and according to gender, race, social class, age, national and local cultures.

Marta Gutman is an associate professor of architecture at the School of Architecture,  Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York. Ning de Coninck-Smith is an associate professor of educational sociology at the Danish Educational University.

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/designing_modern_childhoods.html

Inventing Modern Adolescence:
The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America
Sarah E. Chinn
Publication Date: Summer 2008

The 1960s are commonly considered to be the beginning of a distinct “teenage culture” in America. But did this highly visible era of free love and rock ’n’ roll really mark the start of adolescent defiance? In Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn of the Century America Chinn follows the roots of American teenage identity further back, to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. She argues that the concept of the “generation gap,” a stereotypical complaint against American teens actually originated with the division between immigrant parents and their American born or -raised children. Melding a uniquely urban immigrant sensibility with commercialized consumer culture and a youth-oriented ethos characterized by fun, leisure, and overt sexual behavior, these young people formed a new identity that provided the framework for today’s concepts of teenage lifestyle. Addressing the intersecting issues of urban life, race, gender, sexuality, and class consciousness, Inventing Modern Adolescence is an authoritative and engaging look at a pivotal point in American history and the intriguing, complicated, and still very pertinent teenage identity that emerged from it.

Sarah E. Chinn is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, and the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

In Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality Fields considers the current controversy surrounding sexuality education as it plays out in classrooms and everyday lives of students and teachers. This ethnographic study of sex education in three U.S. schools illuminates the intended and unintended consequences of young people gathering to discuss the bounds of sexual health, acceptability, and pleasure. Fields finds that students learn not only how to care for themselves, but also important lessons about relating to their own and other’s sexualities. These lessons reflect, reinforce, and sometimes challenge racial, gender, and other social inequalities.

Jessica Fields is an assistant professor of sociology at San Francisco State University