Today’s relentless, consumer culture—dominated by popular media’s emphasis on bigger, better, and more, and catering to teenagers every want and desire—is leaving our youth adrift in a sea of conflicting messages. Messages that every youth worker must be able to decode and redirect away from the material world towards helping young people become who God created them to be: givers instead of receivers, servers instead of consumers. Consuming Youth is for any adult who recognizes that following Jesus means leading young people through the pitfalls of consumer culture, helping them discover vocation—where their great gladness meets a world's great need, and unleashing the kingdom of God on earth.

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth. A startling look at youth in our time, Consuming Youth will interest anyone concerned with film, television, and popular culture.

Looks at the way corporations and advertisers target children as a profitable demographic, as well as their methods for getting past parental safeguards to make products of all kinds appeal directly to even the youngest children.

Youth labor is an important element in our modern economy, but as students’ consumption habits have changed, so too have their reasons for working. In Consuming Work, Yasemin Besen-Cassino reveals that many American high school and college students work for social reasons, not monetary gain. Most are affluent, suburban, white youth employed in part-time jobs at places like the Coffee Bean so they can be associated with a cool brand, hangout with their friends, and get discounts. Consuming Work offers a fascinating picture of youth at work and how jobs are marketed to these students. Besen-Cassino also shows how the roots of gender and class inequality in the labor force have their beginnings in this critical labor sector. Exploring the social meaning of youth at work, and providing critical insights into labor and the youth workforce, Consuming Work contributes a deeper understanding of the changing nature of American labor.

Social media has helped boost the culture of intoxication, a central aspect of young people’s social lives in many Western countries. Initial research suggests that these technologies enable highly-nuanced, targeted marketing and innovations – creating new virtual spaces that alter the dynamics and consequences of drinking cultures in significant ways. Youth Drinking Cultures in a Digital World focuses on how pervasive social networking technologies contribute to drinking cultures. It brings together international contributions from leading researchers in this emerging field to explore how new technologies are reconfiguring the key themes, traditional interests, practices and concerns of alcohol-related research with young people. It is particularly concerned with three important areas, namely: identities, social relations and power alcohol marketing and commercialisation public health and regulating alcohol promotion. This innovative book includes original research and commentary and is a must-read for academics and researchers in the areas of public health, psychology, sociology, media studies, youth studies and alcohol studies.

The vampire is one of the nineteenth century's most powerful surviving archetypes, owing largely to Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula, the Bram Stoker creation. Yet the figure of the vampire has undergone many transformations in recent years, thanks to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and other works, and many young people now identify with vampires in complex ways. Blood Read explores these transformations and shows how they reflect and illuminate ongoing changes in postmodern culture. It focuses on the metaphorical roles played by vampires in contemporary fiction and film, revealing what they can tell us about sexuality and power, power and alienation, attitudes toward illness, and the definition of evil in a secular age. Scholars and writers from the United States, Canada, England, and Japan examine how today's vampire has evolved from that of the last century, consider the vampire as a metaphor for consumption within the context of social concerns, and discuss the vampire figure in terms of contemporary literary theory. In addition, three writers of vampire fiction—Suzy McKee Charnas (author of the now-classic Vampire Tapestry), Brian Stableford (writer of the lively and erudite novels Empire of Fear and Young Blood), and Jewelle Gomez (creator of the dazzling Gilda stories)—discuss their own uses of the vampire, focusing on race and gender politics, eroticism, and the nature of evil. The first book to examine a wide range of vampire narratives from the perspective of both writers and scholars, Blood Read offers a variety of styles that will keep readers thoroughly engaged, inviting them to participate in a dialogue between fiction and analysis that shows the vampire to be a cultural necessity of our age. For, contrary to legends in which Dracula has no reflection, we can see reflections of ourselves in the vampire as it stands before us cloaked not in black but in metaphor.