Featuring chapters by an international group of scholars and academics, Rural Youth at the Crossroads discusses the challenges and contexts facing youth from rural communities in countries with legacies of socialism undergoing social, political, and economic transition. The chapters employ a variety of sources and approaches to examine rural youth outcomes, and the well-being and sustainability of rural areas. The book focuses particularly on career and educational goals, the often contradictory relations between rural schools and communities, majority-minoritized group relations, community engagement, and political attitudes. Individual chapters examine these questions and dynamics within Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Vietnam. In total the volume represents a unique and timely comparative discussion of the relationship between youth and rural development within transitional societies, and the challenges and opportunities for enhancing the well-being and sustainability of rural communities. Aimed at informing strategies to revitalize rural social space, this book is targeted towards social scientists with interest in sociology and rural sociology, demography, education, youth development, community/regional development, rurality, public policy, and identity formation in transitional contexts. As such, this book will have international appeal to researchers, educators, and policymakers in transitional countries, and to those interested in these topics, regions, and communities.

Based on eleven months of field work (2009-2011), this book analyzes the situation of youth in urban Gulu, Northern Uganda, in the aftermath of the war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government (1986-2006). Specifically, it focuses on the generation that was born and grew up during the 20-year war: How do members of this generation perceive and evaluate socio-cultural changes which occurred in Acholi society throughout the war years? How do they imagine their future society? And how do they react to the expectations directed at them by their elders? In order to answer these questions, the book draws on rich ethnographic material. It provides an in-depth analysis of how imaginations of the post-war society are contested and negotiated between different groups of social actors – youth and elders, men and women as well as local, national and international actors. While some try to re-establish former cultural practices and conventions and call for a ‘retraditionalization’ of Acholi society, others lobby for ‘modernization’ and attempt to establish ‘new’ social structures, values and norms which are strongly influenced by local understandings of ‘the Western culture’. The book presents numerous examples of the multiple and complex ways young people strategically position themselves in these debates and make use of the various discourses on culture, tradition and modernity in their negotiations of generational, gender, family, and peer-to-peer relations.

‘His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch-like triumph’ Telegraph

Providing a comprehensive analysis of the increasingly common phenomenon of child migration, this volume examines the experiences of children in a wide variety of migratory circumstances including economic child migrants, transnational students, trafficked, stateless, fostered, unaccompanied and undocumented children.