Marcelo Diversi – författare

Decades of demographic studies and applied efforts have convinced scholars, students, and social workers that young people coming of age and transitioning out of the foster care system face great challenges in health, education, income, and general well-being. Despite the wealth of research on these outcomes, we know much less about the lived experiences of young people leaving foster care.

Aging Out of the Foster System: Youths'' Perspectives adds to this narrative the personal experiences of young people who are aging out or have aged out of their child welfare placement. The authors center the stories of these young people and apply critical ethnographic methods to frame their accounts with attention to the encounters within which they were produced, including power imbalances, institutional contexts, and relational dynamics.

By centering the experiences of youths in these contexts and attending to the larger forces at work, this book helps connect the dots between youth aging out of the foster care system, social workers in Independent Living Programs, and the professors and scholars teaching the next generations of professionals working to support the aging out process.

Decades of demographic studies and applied efforts have convinced scholars, students, and social workers that young people coming of age and transitioning out of the foster care system face great challenges in health, education, income, and general well-being. Despite the wealth of research on these outcomes, we know much less about the lived experiences of young people leaving foster care.

Aging Out of the Foster System: Youths'' Perspectives adds to this narrative the personal experiences of young people who are aging out or have aged out of their child welfare placement. The authors center the stories of these young people and apply critical ethnographic methods to frame their accounts with attention to the encounters within which they were produced, including power imbalances, institutional contexts, and relational dynamics.

By centering the experiences of youths in these contexts and attending to the larger forces at work, this book helps connect the dots between youth aging out of the foster care system, social workers in Independent Living Programs, and the professors and scholars teaching the next generations of professionals working to support the aging out process.

How do we persuade people that we all have common experiences and hopes? That we are ever more dependent on each other in times of globalization via technology, commerce, climate change, and overpopulation? How do we move from an "Us and Them" mentality to simply "Us"?

In this book, a follow-up to their first book Betweener Talk, the authors share autoethnographies about being and doing scholarship as betweeners searching for inclusivity. The authors have witnessed an escalation of division in their native Brazil and in the USA, as well as in South America more broadly and Europe – places that had been making steady, albeit slow, progress toward greater inclusion. The book explores identity, interactions, existence, and possibilities in the spaces between "Us" and "Them" to help current and future generations imagine a more inclusive way of living – as Us. It is about how two Third World scholars think the Postcolonial/Decolonizing discourse – with a performance studies lens – can further notions of inclusive social justice through scholarship borne out of lived oppression and the struggle for humanization.

It is a union of two authors who, in their own words "have been close friends since our youth, both captivated by Paulo Freire’s notion of education and social transformation through a praxis of conscientização (conscientization), but who experienced life growing up at opposite ends of the social class spectrum. Early through love and later through theory, we have come to viscerally inhabit and embrace our betweener identities in scholarship and daily lives, breaking the distance between us and the paradigms that attempt to separate political, personal, and professional life."

The authors’ hope is that their own and other betweener autoethnographies can contribute to the larger qualitative inquiry global movement and its central goal: marching together toward ever greater social justice.

How do we persuade people that we all have common experiences and hopes? That we are ever more dependent on each other in times of globalization via technology, commerce, climate change, and overpopulation? How do we move from an "Us and Them" mentality to simply "Us"?

In this book, a follow-up to their first book Betweener Talk, the authors share autoethnographies about being and doing scholarship as betweeners searching for inclusivity. The authors have witnessed an escalation of division in their native Brazil and in the USA, as well as in South America more broadly and Europe – places that had been making steady, albeit slow, progress toward greater inclusion. The book explores identity, interactions, existence, and possibilities in the spaces between "Us" and "Them" to help current and future generations imagine a more inclusive way of living – as Us. It is about how two Third World scholars think the Postcolonial/Decolonizing discourse – with a performance studies lens – can further notions of inclusive social justice through scholarship borne out of lived oppression and the struggle for humanization.

It is a union of two authors who, in their own words "have been close friends since our youth, both captivated by Paulo Freire’s notion of education and social transformation through a praxis of conscientização (conscientization), but who experienced life growing up at opposite ends of the social class spectrum. Early through love and later through theory, we have come to viscerally inhabit and embrace our betweener identities in scholarship and daily lives, breaking the distance between us and the paradigms that attempt to separate political, personal, and professional life."

The authors’ hope is that their own and other betweener autoethnographies can contribute to the larger qualitative inquiry global movement and its central goal: marching together toward ever greater social justice.