Critical Youth Studies Reader: Preface by Paul Willis

This book won the 2014 AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award.

This reader begins a conversation about the many aspects of critical youth studies. Chapters in this volume consider essential issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, and schooling in creating a dialogue about and a conversation with youth. In a society that continues to devalue, demonize, and pathologize young women and men, leading names in the academy and youth communities argue that traditional studies of youth do not consider young people themselves. Engaging with today’s young adults in formal and informal pedagogical settings as an act of respect, social justice, and transgression creates a critical pedagogical path in which to establish a meaningful twenty-first century critical youth studies.

Awad Ibrahim is professor of Education, University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interest in cultural studies, Hip Hop, youth, and Black popular culture, social foundations (philosophy, history, and sociology of education), social justice and community service learning, diasporic and continental African identities, ethnography, and applied linguistics. He has researched and published widely in these areas. Among his books are The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity and the Politics of Becoming (Peter Lang, 2014); Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and the Arts of the Possible (2014) with Nicholas Ng-A-Fook and Giuliano Reis; Global Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language (2009) with Samy Alim and Alastair Pennycook.
Shirley R. Steinberg is research chair and professor of Youth Studies and director of The Werklund Foundation Centre for Youth Leadership in Education at the University of Calgary. Her most recent books include: Critical Qualitative Research Reader (2012); Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (2011); Teaching Against Islamophobia (2011); 19 Urban Questions: Teaching in the City (2010); and the award-winning Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia with Priya Parmar and Birgit Richard (2005). She is a national columnist for CTV News Channel’s Culture Shock and a regular contributor to CBC Radio One, CTV, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette, and the Canadian press. The organizer of The International Institute for Critical Pedagogy and Transformative Leadership, she is committed to a global community of transformative educators and community workers engaged in social justice, and the situating of power within social and cultural contexts. Freireproject.org