Youth are, by definition, the future. This book brings initial analyses to bear on youth in the five BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which are home to nearly half of the world's youth. Very little is known about these youth outside of their own countries since the mainstream views on 'youth' and 'youth culture' are derived from the available literature on youth in the industrialized West, which is home to a small part of the world's youth. This book aims to help fill in this gap.The handbook examines the state of youth, their past, present and permits the development of insights about future. The BRICS countries have all engaged in development processes and some remarkable improvements in young people's lives over recent decades are documented. However, the chapters also show that these gains can be undermined by instabilities, poor decisions and external factors in those countries. Periods of economic growth, political progress, cultural opening up and subsequent reversals rearticulate differently in each society. The future of youth is sharply impacted by recent transformations of economic, political and social realities. As new opportunities emerge and the influence of tradition on youth's lifestyles weakens and as their norms and values change, the youth enter into conflict with dominant expectations and power structures.The topics covered in the book include politics, education, health, employment, leisure, Internet, identities, inequalities and demographics. The chapters provide original insights into the development of the BRICS countries, and place the varied mechanisms of youth development in context. This handbook serves as a reference to those who are interested in having a better understanding of today's youth. Readers will become acquainted with many issues that are faced today by young people and understand that through fertile dialogues and cooperation, youth can play a role in shaping the future of the world.

Ninety percent of the world's youth live in Africa, Latin America and the developing countries of Asia. Despite this, the field of Youth Studies, like many others, is dominated by the knowledge economy of the Global North. To address these geo-political inequalities of knowledge, The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies offers a contribution from Southern scholars to remake Youth Studies from its current state, that universalises Northern perspectives, into a truly Global Youth Studies. Contributors from across various regions of the Global South, including from the Diaspora, Indigenous and Aboriginal communities, locate and define "the Global South", articulate the necessity of studying Southern lives to enrich, re-interpret, legitimate and offer symmetry to Youth Studies, and utilize and innovate Southern theory to do so. Eleven concepts are re-imagined and re-presented throughout the Handbook--personhood, intersectionality, violences, de- and post-coloniality, consciousness, precarity, fluid modernities, ontological insecurity, navigational capacities, collective agency and emancipation. The outcome is a series of everyday practices such as hustling, navigating, fixing, waiting, being on standby, silence, and life-writing, that demonstrate how youth living in adversity experiment with and push back against routine and conformity, and how research may support them in these endeavors and, simultaneously, redefine the relationships between knowledge, practice and politics-what the volume editors term "epistepraxis". The Handbook concludes with a nascent charter for a Global Youth Studies of benefit to the world, that no longer excludes, assumes or elides but rather includes new possibilities for representing youth, researching amongst them, and devising policies and interventions to better serve them. This volume is a critical addition to the field of Youth Studies and one that should be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students working in this area in both the Global North and South.

Higher education has come under increasing public scrutiny in recent years, assailed with demands for greater efficiency, accountability, cost reduction, and, above all, job training. Drawing upon examples from across the world, with an emphasis on Anglo-American higher-education systems, this handbook employs sociological approaches to address these pressing concerns. The second edition is thoroughly updated and adds several new chapters to shed further light on the transformations wrought by the interrelated processes of massification, vocationalization, and marketization that have swept through universities in the wake of neoliberal reforms introduced by governments since the 1980s. The handbook explores recent developments in higher-education systems and policy as well as the everyday experiences of students and staff and ongoing problems of inequality and diversity within universities. In doing so, the chapters address a number of current issues concerning the legitimacy of higher-educational credentials, from the continuing debate regarding traditional pedagogies and the role of universities in social class reproduction to more recent concerns about standards in mass systems. Collectively, this handbook demonstrates that the sociology of higher education has the potential to play a leadership role in improving the myriad higher-education systems around the world that are now part of an interrelated set of subsystems, replete with both persistent problems and promising prospects. This book is therefore necessary reading for a variety of stakeholders within academia as well as professionals and policy-makers interested in understanding higher education and the acute challenges it faces.

Beyond hegemonic thoughts, the Post-Western sociology enables a new dialogue between East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) and Europe on common and local knowledge to consider theoretical continuities and discontinuities, to develop transnational methodological spaces, and co-produce creolized concepts. With this new paradigm in social sciences we introduce the multiplication of epistemic autonomies vis-à-vis Western hegemony and new theoretical assemblages between East-Asia and European sociologies. From this ecology of knowledge this groundbreaking contribution is to coproduce a post-Western space in a cross-pollination process where “Western” and “non-Western” knowledge do interact, articulated through cosmovisions, as well as to coproduce transnational fieldwork practices.

Sociologies in Dialogue brings together expert contributions from international scholars, who reflect on the importance of collaboration between diverse sociological perspectives to enhance our understanding of the role of sociology as an academic discipline, and as a vehicle for social change. By exploring the distinctive practices and research of a range of sociologists, the book shows how an open dialogue between sociologists is critical to addressing major sociological issues across the globe such as inequality and ethnocentrism, and challenging the hierarchies of knowledge production and circulation. Contributors also discuss novel strands in theory and methodology such as multicultural sociology, cosmopolitanism, and multiple modernities. An important contribution for researchers and students interested in global sociology, sociological theories and methodologies.

In this groundbreaking Research Handbook on the Sociology of Youth, researchers from the Global North and South examine the social, political, cultural and ecological processes that inform what it means to be young. It explores the diversity of youth experiences and ways young people live their lives, responding to and actively working to overcome inequality, adversity and planetary crises.