Youth Revolution is the inspirational story of how Kiara Nirghin, a sixteen-year-old high-school student from Johannesburg, overcame severe health obstacles to win the grand prize at the 2016 International Google Science Fair for her unique and innovative solution to worldwide drought. Having experienced bacterial meningitis, undiagnosed bilharzia and severe weight loss, Kiara was forced to postpone her school career for hospitalisation, with a real chance of losing her hearing, her sight and the use of her limbs. Youth Revolution not only covers her journey from the hospital bed to the international stage as the winner of the science award, but also looks at issues surrounding stagnant youth innovation, while considering the dangers of lacking diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). The book includes contributions from prominent women in science and education, among them Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. Youth Revolution is a deeply human and truly inspirational real-life story that will enthral teenagers and adults alike, proving that even ‘ordinary’ teenagers can do extraordinary things.

What were the consequences if prerevolutionary and "bourgeois" culture and social relations could not be transformed into new socialist forms of behavior and belief?".

A gripping, in-depth account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, through the eyes of its youthful vanguard January 25, 2011, was a watershed moment for Egypt and a transformative experience for the young men and women who changed the course of their nation’s history. Tahrir’s Youth tells the story of the organized youth behind the mass uprising that brought about the spectacular collapse of the Mubarak regime. Who were these activists? What did they want? How did the movement they unleashed shape them as it unfolded, and why did it ultimately fall short of its goals? Rusha Latif follows the trajectory of the movement from the perspective of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC), a key front forged in Tahrir Square during the early days of the revolt. Drawing on firsthand testimonies and her own direct experience, she offers insight into the motives, hopes, strategies, successes, failures, and disillusionments of the movement’s leaders. Her account details the challenges these activists faced as they attempted to steer the movement they had set in motion and highlights the factors leading to their struggle’s defeat, despite its initial promise. Tahrir’s Youth questions the belief that Egypt’s revolution was spontaneous and leaderless. Timely and necessary, this study not only illuminates the uprising’s leadership dynamics but also demonstrates the need for imagining new modes of revolutionary organizing for the twenty-first century.

Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth Culture and Politics in 1960s Cuba is a new history of the first decade of the Cuban Revolution, exploring how youth came to play such an important role in the 1960s on this Caribbean island. Certainly, youth culture and politics worldwide were in the ascendant in that decade, but in this pioneering and thought-provoking work Anne Luke explains how the unique circumstances of the newly developing socialist revolution in Cuba created an ethos of youth which becomes one of the factors that explains how and why the Cuban Revolution survives to this day. By examining how youth was constructed and constituted within revolutionary discourse, policy, and the lived experience of young Cubans in the 1960s, Luke examines the conflicted (but ultimately successful) development of a revolutionary youth culture. She explores the fault lines along which the notion of youth was created—between the internal and the external, between discourse and the everyday, between politics and culture. Luke looks at how in the first decade of the Cuban Revolution a young leadership—Fidel, Raúl and Che—were complemented by a group of new protagonists from Cuba’s young generation. These could be literacy teachers, party members, militia members, teachers, singers, poets… all aiming to define and shape the Cuban Revolution. Together young Cubans took part in defining what it meant to be young, socialist and Cuban in this effervescent decade. The picture that emerges is one in which neither youth politics nor youth culture can alone help to explain the first decade of the Revolution; rather through the sometimes conflicted intersection of both there emerged a generation constantly to be renewed—a youth in Revolution.