Hernan Cuervo – författare

This book explores what social justice looks like for rural schools in Australia. The author challenges the consensus that sees the distribution of resources as the panacea for the myriad challenges faced by rural schools and argues that the solution to inequality and injustice in rural settings has to take into account other important dimensions of social justice such as recognition and association. These include teachers’ concerns for issues of power, respect, and participation in their work that extend to policy-making processes and implementation; students’ post-school aspirations and, finally, parents’ hopes and fears for their children’s futures and the sustainability of their community. The book brings together political and social theory with education and youth studies, provides new insights about the complex nature of schooling in rural places, and makes a strong connection between schooling and the people and communities it serves.   

This book takes a global perspective to address the concept of belonging in youth studies, interrogating its emergence as a reoccurring theme in the literature and elucidating its benefits and shortcomings. While belonging offers new alignments across previously divergent approaches to youth studies, its pervasiveness in the field has led to criticism that it means both everything and nothing and thus requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. The authors do this work to provide an accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses belonging by focusing on transitions, participation, citizenship and mobility to address its theoretical and historical underpinnings and its prevalence in youth policy and research.

This book investigates the life trajectories of Generation X and Y Australians through the 1990s and 2000s. The book defies popular characterizations of members of the ‘precarious generations’ as greedy, narcissistic and self-obsessed, revealing instead that many of the members of these generations struggle to reach the standard of living enjoyed by their parents, value learning highly and are increasingly concerned about the environment and the legacy current generations are leaving for their children and remain optimistic in the face of considerable challenges.

Drawing on data from the Life Patterns longitudinal study of Australian youth (an internationally recognized study), the book tells the story of members of these ‘precarious generations’. It examines significant dimensions of young people’s lives across time, comparing how domains such as health and well-being, education, work and relationships intersect to produce the complex outcomes that characterize the lives of members of each of these generations. It also explores the strategies these generations use to make their lives and the ways in which they remain resilient. While the book is based on Australian data, the analysis draws on and contributes to the international literature on young people and social change.