Highlights the work trans youth do to create inclusive spaces in schools

Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid presents a poignant critique of educational policies aimed at supporting trans and gender-nonconforming youth in schools. Over the years, caring adults have recognized these students as vulnerable and have tried to create inclusive environments to address their unique challenges. However, the book argues that these approaches have inadvertently perpetuated a narrow definition of trans identity, leaving many trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming youth feeling excluded and unseen.

Based on a year-long ethnographic study conducted in a high school, LJ Slovin closely observes the experiences of gender-nonconforming youth who were often overlooked in the discussions about trans issues. Despite the lack of recognition, these hard-working young individuals persevered, navigating their identities and striving to thrive within the education system.

Through their daily efforts, these young people tried to expand notions of gender in their school environment, building more inclusive spaces that embraced all trans identities. By sharing their stories, Slovin emphasizes the need for educators to shift away from a focus on risk and concern, to instead foster a celebration of trans and gender-nonconforming youth. The book urges educators to cultivate a genuine desire to understand and support trans youth, paving the way for a brighter and queerer future within educational settings.

Explores how humanitarian aid workers help and hinder the care of unaccompanied children as they arrive in the United States

Every year, tens of thousands of children cross into the United States without a legal guardian at their side, often fleeing violence and poverty in their countries of origin. In Unaccompanied, Emily Ruehs-Navarro shows us one aspect of their heartbreaking journeys, as seen through the eyes of the aid workers who try—but too often fail—to help them.

Drawing on interviews with aid workers, migrant children, and others, Ruehs-Navarro follows unaccompanied youth as they seek help from a wide range of professionals. From legal relief organizations to family reunification specialists, she shows us how different aid workers may choose to work for, with, or against unaccompanied immigrant youth, deciding whether they should be treated as refugees, child dependents, or, in some cases, criminals.

Ruehs-Navarro highlights how aid workers, and the systems they represent, often harm the very children they are designed to help. Unaccompanied brings into focus the plight of immigrant youth at the border, illuminating our failure to manage the human casualties of a growing crisis.

The first book-length critical reception of Barrie Thorne’s classic book, Gender Play

Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play was a landmark study of the social worlds of primary school children that sparked a paradigm shift in our understanding of how kids and the adults around them contest and reinforce gender boundaries. Thirty years later, Gender Replay celebrates and reflects on this classic, extending Thorne’s scholarship into a new and different generation.

Freeden Blume Oeur and C. J. Pascoe’s new volume brings together many of the foremost scholars on youth from an array of disciplines, including sociology, childhood studies, education, gender studies, and communication studies. Together, these scholars reflect on many contemporary issues that were not covered in Thorne’s original text, exploring new dimensions of schooling, the sociology of gender, social media, and feminist theory. Over fourteen essays, the authors touch on topics such as youth resistance in the Trump era; girls and technology; the use of play to challenge oppressive racial regimes; youth activism against climate change; the importance of taking kids seriously as social actors; and mentoring as a form of feminist praxis. Gender Replay picks up where Thorne’s text left off, doing the vital work of applying her teachings to a transformed world and to new configurations of childhood.

How travelling the world allows new ways to educate children and perform family life on the move

A growing number of families are selling their houses, quitting their jobs, and taking their children out of traditional school settings to educate them while traveling the globe. In The World is Our Classroom, Jennie Germann Molz explores the hopes and anxieties that drive these parents and children to leave their comfortable lives behind out of a desire to live the “good life” on the move.

Drawing on interviews with parents and stories from the blogs they publish during their journeys, as well as her own experience traveling the world with her ten-year-old son, Germann Molz takes us inside a fascinating life spent on trains, boats, and planes. She shows why many parents—disillusioned with standard public schooling—believe the world is a child’s best classroom. Rebelling against convention, these parents combine technology and travel to pursue a different version of the good life, one in which parents can work remotely as “digital nomads,” participate in like-minded communities online, and expose their children to the risks, opportunities, and life lessons that the world has to offer.

Ultimately, Germann Molz sheds light on the emerging phenomenon of “worldschooling,” showing that it is not just an alternative way to educate children, but an altogether new kind of mobile lifestyle. The World is Our Classroom paints an extreme portrait of twenty-first century parenting and some families’ attempts to raise global citizens prepared to thrive in the uncertain world of tomorrow.

An important new collection on the nature and consequences of bullying

School shootings and suicides by young victims of bullying have spurred a proliferation of anti-bullying programs, yet most of the research done on school bullying has been from psychologists. The Sociology of Bullying will be the first volume to present the leading ideas in sociology about bullying among adolescents that moves beyond an individualistic approach and instead offers ideas about how to address bullying as a byproduct of social systems, biases, and status hierarchies. Sociologists investigate the impact of social forces on bullying among adolescents, such as inequality, heteronormativity, militarized capitalism, racism, cancel culture, power, and competition.

Contributors explore a wide range of key topics, such as how homophobia and gender normativity encourage bullying; how anti-bullying curricula can ultimately lead to more bullying; and how adolescents use bullying against their friends to improve their own social standing. By advancing sociological perspectives on bullying, this important volume aims to shift the national conversation from one that focuses on villainizing bullies to one that encourages an inward look at the aspects of our culture that foster bullying behavior among children.

An inside look at young Iranians navigating poverty and stigma in a time of crisis

Crippling sanctions, inflation, and unemployment have increasingly burdened young people in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Coming of Age in Iran, Manata Hashemi takes us inside the lives of poor Iranian youth, showing how these young men and women face their future prospects.

Drawing on first-hand accounts, Hashemi follows their stories, one by one, as they struggle to climb up the proverbial ladder of success. Based on years of ethnographic research among these youth in their homes, workspaces, and places of leisure, Hashemi shows how public judgments can give rise to meaningful changes for some while making it harder for others to escape poverty. Ultimately, Hashemi sheds light on the pressures these young men and women face, showing how many choose to comply with—rather than resist—social norms in their pursuit of status and belonging.

Coming of Age in Iran tells the unprecedented story of how Iran’s young and struggling attempt to extend dignity and alleviate misery, illuminating the promises—and limits—of finding one’s place during a time of profound uncertainty.

2018 Morris Rosenberg Award, DC Sociological Society

In recent years, questions such as “what are kids eating?” and “who’s feeding our kids?” have sparked a torrent of public and policy debates as we increasingly focus our attention on the issue of childhood obesity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that while 1 in 3 American children are either overweight or obese, that number is higher for children living in concentrated poverty. Enduring inequalities in communities, schools, and homes affect young people’s access to different types of food, with real consequences in life choices and health outcomes. Fast-Food Kids sheds light on the social contexts in which kids eat, and the broader backdrop of social change in American life, demonstrating why attention to food’s social meaning is important to effective public health policy, particularly actions that focus on behavioral change and school food reforms.



Through in-depth interviews and observation with high school and college students, Amy L. Best provides rich narratives of the everyday life of youth, highlighting young people’s voices and perspectives and the places where they eat.



The book provides a thorough account of the role that food plays in the lives of today’s youth, teasing out the many contradictions of food as a cultural object—fast food portrayed as a necessity for the poor and yet, reviled by upper-middle class parents; fast food restaurants as one of the few spaces that kids can claim and effectively ‘take over’ for several hours each day; food corporations spending millions each year to market their food to kids and to lobby Congress against regulations; schools struggling to deliver healthy food young people will actually eat, and the difficulty of arranging family dinners, which are known to promote family cohesion and stability.



A conceptually-driven, ethnographic account of youth and the places where they eat, Fast-Food Kids examines the complex relationship between youth identity and food consumption, offering answers to those straightforward questions that require crucial and comprehensive solutions.

LGBTQ kids reveal what it’s like to be young and queer today

Growing Up Queer explores the changing ways that young people are now becoming LGBT-identified in the US. Through interviews and three years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, Mary Robertson focuses on the voices and stories of youths themselves in order to show how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives.

The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as children and adolescents. This groundbreaking and timely consideration of queer identity demonstrates how sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes as opposed to being natural characteristics that one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture where being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, Robertson argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity, but is understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

Details the possibilities and challenges of intergenerational activism and social movements

Since 1976, the Peruvian movement of working children has fought to redefine age-based roles in society, including defending children’s right to work. In The Kids Are in Charge, Jessica K. Taft gives us an inside look at this groundbreaking, intergenerational social movement, showing that kids can—and should be—respected as equal partners in economic, social, and political life.

Through participant observation, Taft explores how the movement has redefined relationships between kids and adults; how they put these ideas into practice within their organizations; and how they advocate for them in larger society. Ultimately, she encourages us to question the widely accepted beliefs that children should not work or participate in politics.

The Kids Are in Charge is a provocative invitation to re-imagine childhood, power, and politics.

Winner, 2019 William J. Goode Book Award, given by the Family Section of the American Sociological Association

Finalist, 2019 C. Wright Mills Award, given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems


Riveting stories of how affluent, white children learn about race

American kids are living in a world of ongoing public debates about race, daily displays of racial injustice, and for some, an increased awareness surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America.

White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race. In doing so, this book explores questions such as, “How do white kids learn about race when they grow up in families that do not talk openly about race or acknowledge its impact?” and “What about children growing up in families with parents who consider themselves to be ‘anti-racist’?”

Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves. By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts—from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative—this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.

Winner, Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award of the Section on Children and Youth, given by the American Sociological Association

Finalist for the 2021 C. Wright Mills Award, given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Latinx children navigating identity, citizenship, and belonging in a divided America

An estimated sixty million people in the United States are of Latinx descent, with youth under the age of eighteen making up two-thirds of this swiftly growing demographic. In Growing Up Latinx, Jesica Siham Fernández explores the lives of Latinx youth as they grapple with their social and political identities from an early age, and pursue a sense of belonging in their schools and communities as they face an increasingly hostile political climate.

Drawing on interviews with nine-to-twelve-year-olds, Fernández gives us rare insight into how Latinx youth understand their own citizenship and bravely forge opportunities to be seen, to be heard, and to belong. With a compassionate eye, she shows us how they strive to identify, and ultimately redefine, what it means to come of age—and fight for their rights—in a country that does not always recognize them.

Fernández follows Latinx youth as they navigate family, school, community, and country ties, richly detailing their hopes and dreams as they begin to advocate for their right to be treated as citizens in full. Growing Up Latinx invites us to witness the inspiring power of young people as they develop and make heard their political voices, broadening our understanding of citizenship.

Honorable Mention, Sex & Gender Section Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association

The surprising reasons parents are opting out of the public school system and homeschooling their kids

Homeschooling has skyrocketed in popularity in the United States: in 2019, a record-breaking 2.5 million children were being homeschooled. In The Homeschool Choice, Kate Henley Averett provides insight into this fascinating phenomenon, exploring the perspectives of parents who have chosen to homeschool their children.

Drawing on in-depth interviews, Averett examines the reasons why these parents choose to homeschool, from those who disagree with sex education and LGBT content in schools, to others who want to protect their children’s sexual and gender identities. With eye-opening detail, she shows us how homeschooling is a trend being chosen by an increasingly diverse subset of American families, at times in order to empower—or constrain—children’s gender and sexuality.

Ultimately, Averett explores how homeschooling, as a growing practice, has changed the roles that families, schools, and the state play in children’s lives. As teachers, parents, and policymakers debate the future of public education, The Homeschool Choice sheds light on the ongoing struggle over school choice.