Across the metropole, the colonies, and the wider eighteenth-century world, French children and youth participated in a diverse set of state-building initiatives, social reform programs, and imperial expansion efforts. Young Subjects explores the lives and experiences of these youth, revealing their role as active and vital agents in the shaping of early modern France. Through a set of regional case studies, Julia Gossard demonstrates how thousands of children and youth were engaged in the service of the state. In Lyon, charity schools cultivated children as agents of moral and social reform who carried their lessons home to their families. In Paris, orphaned and imprisoned youth trained in skilled trades or prepared for military service, while others were sent to the French colonies in North America as filles du roi and sturdy labourers. Young people from merchant families were recruited to serve as cultural brokers and translators on behalf of French commerical interests in the Ottoman Empire and Siam. In each case, Gossard considers how these youth played, negotiated, and sometimes resisted their roles, and what expressions of individual identity and agency were available to subjects under the legal control of others. As sources of labour, future taxpayers, colonial subjects, cultural mediators, and potential criminals, children and youth were objects of intense interest for civic authorities. Young Subjects refocuses our attention on these often overlooked historical subjects who helped to build France.

This textbook showcases innovative approaches to the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies, examining how young people in a wide range of contemporary and historical contexts around the globe live their young lives as subjects, objects, and agents. The diverse contributions examine how children and youth are simultaneously constructed: as individual subjects through social processes and culturally-specific discourses; as objects of policy intervention and other adult power plays; and also as active agents who act on their world and make meaning even amidst conditions of social, political, and economic marginalization. In addition, the book is centrally engaged with questions about how researchers take into consideration children’s and young people’s own conceptions of themselves and how we conceptualize child and youth potentials for agency at different ages and stages of growing up. Each chapter discusses substantive research but also engages in self-reflection about methodology, positionality, and/or disciplinarity, thus making the volume especially useful for teaching. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including childhood studies, youth studies, girls’ studies, development studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, education, history, geography, public policy, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies and global studies.

It has been said more than once in psychology that one person's effect is another person's error term. By minimising and occasionally ignoring individual and group variability cognitive psychology has yieled many fine achievements. However, when investigators are working with special populations, the subjects, and the unique nature of the sample, come into focus and become the goal in itself. For developmental psychologists, gerontologists and psychopathologists, research progresses with an eye on their target populations of study. Yet every good study in any of these domains inevitably has another dimension. Whenever a study is designed to turn a spotlight on a special population, the light is also shed on the mainstream from which the target deviates.This book examines what we can learn about general and universal phenomena in cognition and its brain substrates from examining the odd, the rare, the transient, the exceptional and the abnormal.

This publication is concerned with gerontechnology - the study of technology and ageing with the aim of improving the functioning of older people in daily life. The first part of the book is a compilation of the key-note addresses describing the background for and the conditions under which the emerging field of gerontechnology can be developed further. The chapters deal with political, socio-economic, ethical, demographic issues related to gerontechnology. Furthermore, methodological approaches in human factors, ergonomics and industrial design are described. Trends in technological developments and innovations conclude the first volume. The second part presents some 80 case studies, divided over 9 sections (1) perception and cognition, (2) communication technology, (3) mobility and transport, (4) health and home care technology, (5) housing, (6) training and education, (7) safety and security, (8) product design and (9) culture and attitudes.

The appropriate and rational use of drugs by the elderly is a matter of growing medical and social concern. Persons aged 65 years and older constitute about 12%-15% of the population in the Western world, and the total number of the elderly will increase significantly in the coming years. This population accounts for 30% of all the prescription drugs used. Aging, specifically the transition from middle to old age, is a complex process. From the perspective of clinical pharmacology, these pathophysiological changes may reasonably be expected to alter responsiveness to drugs. The age-related differences in response to drugs can arise from alterations in pharmacokinetics or pharmacodynamics. This makes it mandatory that clinical pharma cological studies be carried out in the elderly during extended phase I studies. The older the population likely to use the drug, the more important it is to include the very old. It is also important not to exclude .... :''lecessarily patients with concomitant illnesses; it is only by observing, such patients that drug-disease interactions can be detected. Reports from surveillance systems have greatly increased our awareness of problems associated with drug therapy in old age.

Cognitive reserve has emerged as a powerful concept for interpreting individual differences in susceptibility to, and recovery from, brain injury or pathology. Underlying cognitive reserve is the idea that individual differences in how cognitive tasks are mediated in the brain allow some people to cope with pathology to a greater degree than others. Cognitive Reserve: Theory and Applications describes in depth the source of these individual differences. This volume provides a comprehensive review of theory, research and clinical application of the cognitive reserve. Chapters explore the theoretical underpinnings of cognitive reserve, and evidence for its existence. Various approaches for studying this concept are addressed, including epidemiologic, cognitive experimental, and neuroimaging. Possible genetic and physiologic underpinnings of cognitive reserve are presented. Application of this concept to a wide range of situations, including child development, aging, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, HIV, and head injury is discussed. The result is an up-to-date, global treatment of cognitive reserve that will be of interest to someone new to the concept or the experienced investigator.

This book is the first to view the effects of development, aging, and practice on the control of human voluntary movement from a contemporary context. Emphasis is on the links between progress in basic motor control research and applied areas such as motor disorders and motor rehabilitation. Relevant to both professionals in the areas of motor control, movement disorders, and motor rehabilitation, and to students starting their careers in one of these actively developed areas.