Recent Book Publications by Rutgers–Camden Childhood Studies Faculty and Graduates

The Department of Childhood Studies is excited to announce the recent publication of two books by recent PhD graduates, based on their dissertation research, and two by department faculty:

Diane Marano (PhD, Childhood Studies, 2014) Juvenile Offenders and Guns: Voices Behind Gun Violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) explores how and why twenty-five incarcerated young men of color acquired and used guns, how guns made them feel, and how they felt about the violence in which they participated as well as the violence to which they were exposed as victims and witnesses. Through their narratives, patterns emerge of boys attempting to become men in homes headed by mothers who struggled financially, the multiple attractions of the street that exceeded those of school, and the risks of the street lifestyle that prompted these youth to arm themselves. http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137520135

Marianne Modica (PhD, Childhood Studies, 2014) Race among Friends: Exploring Race at a Suburban School (Rutgers University Press, 2015) argues that attempts to be colorblind do not end racism—in fact, ignoring race increases the likelihood that racism will occur in our schools and in society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a “racially friendly” suburban US high school, Modica finds that race affects the daily experiences of students and teachers in profound but unexamined ways—particularly through student friendships and administrative practices. https://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/Race-among-Friends,5632.aspx

Associate Professor Lauren Silver has published System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Regulation (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). This intriguing study considers the daily lives of adolescent mothers as they negotiate the child welfare system to meet the needs of their children and themselves. Combining critical policy study and ethnography, and drawing on current scholarship as well as her own experience as a welfare program manager, Lauren Silver demonstrates how social welfare “silos” construct the lives of youth as disconnected, reinforcing unforgiving policies and imposing demands on women the system was intended to help. https://uncpress.unc.edu/books/12537.html

Associate Professor Sarada Balagopalan Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) redresses the limits of the notion of ‘multiple childhoods’ commonly deployed as a way to recognizes the heterogeneity of children’s lives and experiences. This ambitious ethnography redresses these limits by drawing on the everyday experiences of street children and child labourers in Calcutta to introduce the postcolony as a critical, and thus far absent, lens in theorizing the ‘child’. Through capturing a moment in which global, national and local efforts combined to improve and transform these children’s lives through school enrolment and new discourses of ‘children’s rights’, this ethnography makes a vital point about the complexity and contemporaneity of their extensive practices of dwelling generated by the exigencies of survival within postcolonial ‘development’. https://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/inhabiting-childhood-children-labour-and-schooling-in-postcolonial-india-sarada-balagopalan/?isb=9780230296428