Examines the changing political and social strategies of contemporary young people around the globe.

Telling Young Lives presents more than a dozen fascinating, ethnograph-ically informed portraits of young people facing rapid changes in society and politics from different parts of the world. From a young woman engaged in agricultural labor in the High Himalayas to a youth activist based in Tanzania, the distinctive voices from the U.K., India, Germany, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Bosnia Herzegovina, provide insights into the active and creative ways these youths are addressing social and political challenges such as war, hunger and homelessness. Telling Young Lives has great appeal for classroom use in geography courses and makes a welcome contribution to the growing field of “young geographies,” as well as to politics and political geography. Its focus on individual portraits gives readers a fuller, more vivid picture of the ways in which global changes are reshaping the actual experiences and strategies of young people around the world.

“Ash’s book paints a telling portrait of this most restless generation raised in a system that has provided them with unprecedented personal opportunities while denying them political ones . . . A gifted observer.”—Washington Post If China will rule the world one day, who will rule China? There are more than 320 million Chinese between the ages of sixteen and thirty. Children of the one-child policy, born after Mao, with no memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they are the first net native generation to come of age in a market-driven, more international China. Their experiences and aspirations were formed in a radically different country from the one that shaped their elders, and their lives will decide the future of their nation and its place in the world. Wish Lanterns offers a deep dive into the life stories of six young Chinese. Dahai is a military child, netizen, and self-styled loser. Xiaoxiao is a hipster from the freezing north. “Fred,” born on the tropical southern island of Hainan, is the daughter of a Party official, while Lucifer is a would-be international rock star. Snail is a country boy and Internet gaming addict, and Mia is a fashionista rebel from far west Xinjiang. Following them as they grow up, go to college, find work and love, all the while navigating the pressure of their parents and society, Wish Lanterns paints a vivid portrait of Chinese youth culture and of a millennial generation whose struggles and dreams reflect the larger issues confronting China today.

An extraordinary true account of the enormous tragedy of the Syrian civil conflict. Since the revolution-turned-civil war in Syria began in 2011, over 500,000 civilians have been killed and more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced. Rania Abouzeid, one of the foremost journalists on the topic, follows two pairs of sisters from opposite sides of the conflict to give readers a firsthand glimpse of the turmoil and devastation this strife has wrought. Sunni Muslim Ruha and her younger sister Alaa withstand constant attacks by the Syrian government in rebel-held territory. Alawite sisters Hanin and Jawa try to carry on as normal in the police state of regime-held Syria. The girls grow up in a world where nightly bombings are routine and shrapnel counts as toys. They bear witness to arrests, killings, demolished homes, and further atrocities most adults could not imagine. Still, war does not dampen their sense of hope.Through the stories of Ruha and Alaa and Hanin and Jawa, Abouzeid presents a clear-eyed and page-turning account of the complex conditions in Syria leading to the onset of the harrowing conflict. With Abouzeid's careful attention and remarkable reporting, she crafts an incredibly empathetic and nuanced narrative of the Syrian civil war, and the promise of progress these young people still embody.

In the village of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Hercegovina, six teenagers - two boys and four girls - began to report seeing visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the summer of 1981. Since then, millions of people have made pilgrimages to this remote mountain village, where the messages of Mary give hope and comfort to those who are needy, suffering, or searching. "After nearly 24 years of daily appearances to these children - all of whom are now adults, married and with children of their own - the fruits of conversion continue to serve as a testament to their initial claim," writes Weible. "Not surprisingly, the most dramatic of these conversions are those of young people, beginning with the visionaries themselves." A Child Shall Lead Them is a collection of such stories and anecdotes from Medjugorje. They cover a full range of emotions, trials, and miracles; from heartbreak to intense happiness. In all of them there is solid proof of what happens when a heart is converted to that of a child: a return to innocence, and an openness and receptivity to faith. Each chapter ends with a monthly message given by the Blessed Virgin Mary at Medjugorje. Click here to listen to an interview with Wayne Weible

Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple political stances that make up life at the margins, this book provides a novel source for a critical rethinking of marginalisation. Drawing on post-colonialism and critical assemblage thinking, the rich ethnographic works presented in the book trace the assemblage of marginality in multiple case-studies encompassing the Global North and South. These works are united by the approach developed in the book, characterised by the refusal of a priori definitions and by a post-human and grounded take on the assemblage of life. The result is a nuanced attention to the potential expressed by everyday articulations and a commitment to produce a processual, vitalist and non-normative cultural politics of the margins. The reader will find in this book unique challenges to accepted and authoritative thinking, and provides new insights into researching life at the margins.

Poverty and unemployment are on the rise among Canadian youth. Clearly something needs to change, but current social-assistance models are based on problematic assumptions about the lives and possible trajectories of "risky" young people. Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives explores the difficulties many marginalized young people encounter with the "support system" available to them, as well as the social forces that push them to the margins in the first place. Drawn from interviews with forty-five patrons of a youth drop-in centre, this important work resituates the nexus of the problem from the identification of individual "risk factors" to the recognition of the contradictions and barriers contained in the very social-aid structures that are meant to bring their target populations back in to the fold of "normal" society. Intervention is indeed necessary, but more to challenge the prevailing structures that incorrectly presume how youth themselves interpret risk, poverty, and, most important of all, their own potential.