Ingrid E. Castro – författare

With a qualitative case study of two university campuses in the United States, Ingrid E. Castro examines experiences of students in forming and sustaining close interracial friendships.The data in this book are comprised of interviews with students conducted at two predominantly white institutions in the early 2000s, illuminating how women of various races struggled to find commonality across difference, particularly in relation to racism, white privilege and experiences with stereotyping, microaggressions and segregation on campuses. Taking a feminist approach attending to gender, race and class inequality, Castro contributes autoethnographic recollections of her experiences as a multiethnic Latina college student in the early 1990s. She then analyses Xennial women’s experiences with the benefit of contemporary frameworks and theories on gendered friendships, parental protectionism, campus climate and race relations, and explores the social and academic spaces of campus, which include interest groups, classrooms, majors, and dorms as sites of interaction. The conclusion reflects on the ideology of meritocracy and current DEI efforts on campuses in the U.S., suggesting institutional and policy changes to better campus climate and increase the potential for interracial friendship formation for students. A rich, honest and detailed account of relationships emerges with significant implications for the field of friendship studies and the sociology of higher education.Gender, Race, Inequality and Student Friendship in Higher Education is essential reading for those interested in how universities must move forward in addressing gender, race and class relations on university campuses.

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children’s and youth’s agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity, and friendship traverse across the chapters, framed through various film, television, literature, and virtual media sources. Here, childhood is considered far from homogeneous and the dominance of neoliberal models of agency is questioned by intersectional and intergenerational analyses. This book posits there is vast power in popular culture representations of children’s agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding about children’s lives and within childhood studies.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time intersects considerations about children’s and youth’s agency with the popular culture genre of science fiction. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency in children’s lives, this collection places science fiction at the heart of this endeavor. Retellings of the past, narratives of the present, and new landscapes of the future, each explored in science fiction, allow for creative reimaginings of the capabilities, movements, and agency of youth. Core themes of generation, embodiment, family, identity, belonging, gender, and friendship traverse across the chapters and inform the contributors’ readings of various film, literature, television, and virtual media sources. Here, children and youth are heterogeneous, and agency as a central analytical concept is interrogated through interdisciplinary, intersectional, intergenerational, and posthuman analyses. The contributors argue that there is vast power in science fiction representations of children’s agency to challenge accepted notions of neoliberal agency, enhance understandings of agency in childhood studies, and further contextualize agency in the lives, voices, and cultures of youth.

Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations, part of the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth series, seeks to fill a void in current publications directly addressing the problems and pitfalls that often accompany researching children and youth in today’s society. Sociologists face increasingly limited access to children and youth given their “vulnerable” status, growing requirements from Institutional Review Boards, and more restricted access from organizations and educational institutions. As a result, researchers must be creative in the pursuit of researching kids and teens. Chapters in this volume address such topics as participatory and feminist ethnographic approaches, digital mining, children’s agency, and navigating IRBs. The importance of contextualizing sociological research with children with special consideration of space, location, and identity thematically runs throughout all of the contributions to this volume.

Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations, part of the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth series, seeks to fill a void in current publications directly addressing the problems and pitfalls that often accompany researching children and youth in today’s society. Sociologists face increasingly limited access to children and youth given their “vulnerable” status, growing requirements from Institutional Review Boards, and more restricted access from organizations and educational institutions. As a result, researchers must be creative in the pursuit of researching kids and teens. Chapters in this volume address such topics as participatory and feminist ethnographic approaches, digital mining, children’s agency, and navigating IRBs. The importance of contextualizing sociological research with children with special consideration of space, location, and identity thematically runs throughout all of the contributions to this volume.