Elusive Adulthoods

Elusive Adulthoods
Author: Deborah Durham
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2017-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253030196

Essays on the changing meanings of adulthood in places around the world: “An important collection that furthers anthropological work on life stages.” —Susan Reynolds Whyte, author of Generations in Africa: Connections and Conflicts Elusive Adulthoods examines why, in recent years, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard in societies around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of “What is adulthood?” and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

The Cultural Context of Aging

The Cultural Context of Aging
Author: Jay Sokolovsky
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN:

From the laughing clubs of India and robotic granny minders of Japan to the "Flexsecurity" system of Denmark and the elderscapes of Florida, experts in this collection bring readers cutting-edge and future-focused approaches to our aging population worldwide. In this fourth edition of an award-winning text on the consequences of global aging, a team of expert anthropologists and other social scientists presents the issues and possible solutions as our population over age 60 rises to double that of the year 2000. Chapters describe how the consequences of global aging will influence life in the 21st century in relation to biological limits on the human life span, cultural construction of the life cycle, generational exchange and kinship, makeup of households and community, and attitudes toward disability and death. This completely revised edition includes 20 new chapters covering China, Japan, Denmark, India, West and East Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, indigenous Amazonia, rural Italy, and the ethnic landscape of the United States. A popular feature is an integrated set of web book chapters listed in the contents, discussed in chapter introductions, and available on the book's web site.

Ready Or Not, Here Life Comes

Ready Or Not, Here Life Comes
Author: Mel Levine
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2006-01-18
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0743262255

A nationally known pediatrician and author addresses the question of why some youngsters make a successful transition into adulthood while others do not. Parents and schools often raise children in a highly structured world, leaving them unable to cope on their own. Dr. Levine urges that schools teach "life prep," equipping adolescents with what they will need to succeed as adults. He identifies these skills as "the four I's": inner direction, or self-awareness; interpretation, or understanding the outside world; instrumentation, or the acquisition of mental tools; and interaction, or the ability to relate to other people effectively. He offers advice for young adults who find themselves unable to navigate the world of careers.

Opting Out

Opting Out
Author: Joanna Davidson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2022-11-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1978830122

Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.

Life at Full Throttle

Life at Full Throttle
Author: Avery Ph. D. Catherine Avery Ph. D.
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2010-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1440194637

Life at Full Throttle transports the reader into the unpredictable world of the AD/HD adult in a manner that is highly engaging, while providing insightful and well-researched information on this topic. As a clinical psychologist, Dr. Avery has evaluated over two thousand individuals for AD/HD, and has developed a well-grounded understanding of the type of information that is most helpful to AD/HD adults, as well as a style of delivery that is well received and appreciated by AD/ HD clients and their families. Having lived with this condition her entire life, and being a mother who has parented two children with attention deficits, Dr. Avery speaks of AD/HD with both insight and humor.

Adult Education in America

Adult Education in America
Author: Ben Wood Johnson
Publisher: Tesko Publishing
Total Pages: 67
Release: 2019-06-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1948600129

Relying on personal insights, Dr. Ben wood Johnson offers educators, students, and school administrators alike a glimpse into the reality of adult learning. Adult learners face panoply of situations, which often have detrimental effects on their psyche. The American educational system was not designed for adults. Older learners often face insurmountable obstacles in their quest for an education. For the most part, adult learners are left to fend for themselves. Many of them have no other alternatives but to abandon their educational goals. Adult Education in America—a policy assessment of adult learning—offers the reader a genuine lens to explore the issues. The text focuses on problems related to logistics, pedagogy, employment, relationships among students, school staff (e.g., administrators and faculty), and other personal situation. The book explores common issues in higher education, which many people, including school administrators, are aware of, but seldom tackle with concrete solutions.

Critical Terms for the Study of Africa

Critical Terms for the Study of Africa
Author: Gaurav Desai
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 022654902X

For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders’ wildest imaginings. This problematic notion has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.

Africa's Urban Youth

Africa's Urban Youth
Author: Amy S. Patterson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2023-08-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009235176

Draws from extensive fieldwork in three countries to show how African youth negotiate citizenship through daily obligations, relationships, and political engagement.

Africa Every Day

Africa Every Day
Author: Oluwakemi M. Balogun
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0896805069

Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives. Across seven sections—Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Socializing and Friendship; Love, Sex, and Marriage; Sports and Recreation; Performance, Language, and Creativity; Technology and Media; and Labor and Livelihoods—the accessible, multidisciplinary essays in Africa Every Day address these creative and dynamic elements of daily life, without romanticizing them. Ultimately, the book shows that forms of leisure and popular culture in Africa are best discussed in terms of indigenization, adaptation, and appropriation rather than the static binary of European/foreign/global and African. Most of all, it invites readers to reflect on the crucial similarities, rather than the differences, between their lives and those of their African counterparts. Contributors: Hadeer Aboelnagah, Issahaku Adam, Joseph Osuolale Ayodokun, Victoria Abiola Ayodokun, Omotoyosi Babalola, Martha Bannikov, Mokaya Bosire, Emily Callaci, Deborah Durham, Birgit Englert, Laura Fair, John Fenn, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Michael Gennaro, Lisa Gilman, Charlotte Grabli, Joshua Grace, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Akwasi Kumi-Kyereme, Prince F. M. Lamba, Cheikh Tidiane Lo, Bill McCoy, Nginjai Paul Moreto, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, James Nindi, Erin Nourse, Eric Debrah Otchere, Alex Perullo, Daniel Jordan Smith, Maya Smith, Steven Van Wolputte, and Scott M. Youngstedt.

Elusive Childhood

Elusive Childhood
Author: Susan Honeyman
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081421004X

"Elusive Childhood examines how discourse touched by the identity politics of youth might be revised for fairness. Susan Honeyman demonstrates this potential by reading representations of children from throughout the Modern episteme in works of such writers as Henry James, Edith Wharton, and James Baldwin. Identity politics have changed the way we classify literature by opening up the canon, but they have also changed the way we approach literature. We've learned to recognize that biology is not destiny - sex doesn't necessarily determine gender or orientation, nor do fictitious absolutes like blood ratios measure ethnocultural identity, and so in an effort to avoid false generalizing about "others" we endorse individual self-representation, all the while recognizing how society constructs us." "But when it comes to representing the position we call childhood, there is little opportunity in legitimated discourse for children's self-representation and inadequate attention to social constructedness. Recognizing political inequity in literary representations of children, Honeyman proposes a method of reading child figuration in relief to impose as little adult prejudice as possible. This might be impossible for adults, yet it is necessary to attempt."--BOOK JACKET.