Robert Kilkenny – författare

Adolescent Portraits introduces contemporary theories and research that surround adolescent development today through eighteen first-person accounts written by young adults. The case study approach of the book illustrates the complexity of the individual experience and the interactions among an individual’s needs, ideas, relationships, and context. Each case, taken alone, helps us begin to know one more adolescent and his or her experience; taken together, the cases provide a rich overview of the wide, diverse, and complex range of adolescent experiences.This edition also includes three follow-up essays, written five or more years after their original memoir. The authors of these follow-ups reflect on their original story written in late adolescence from the more mature point of view of full-fledged adulthood. These retrospectives provide a poignant and lifespan developmental perspective on the ways in which the adolescent themes of identity and challenges transform, for better or worse, with the tasks of adulthood.With contributions from adolescents from a range of racial, class, and family backgrounds, the book provides a diverse introduction to the adolescent experience. It is a must-read for any student of adolescent development.

Adolescent Portraits introduces contemporary theories and research that surround adolescent development today through eighteen first-person accounts written by young adults. The case study approach of the book illustrates the complexity of the individual experience and the interactions among an individual’s needs, ideas, relationships, and context. Each case, taken alone, helps us begin to know one more adolescent and his or her experience; taken together, the cases provide a rich overview of the wide, diverse, and complex range of adolescent experiences.This edition also includes three follow-up essays, written five or more years after their original memoir. The authors of these follow-ups reflect on their original story written in late adolescence from the more mature point of view of full-fledged adulthood. These retrospectives provide a poignant and lifespan developmental perspective on the ways in which the adolescent themes of identity and challenges transform, for better or worse, with the tasks of adulthood.With contributions from adolescents from a range of racial, class, and family backgrounds, the book provides a diverse introduction to the adolescent experience. It is a must-read for any student of adolescent development.

Most of what is written these days about young black men and women emphasizes incarceration and mortality rates, teen pregnancy, drug use, and domestic strife. This collection of sixteen autobiographical essays by African-Americans, Africans in America, Afro-Caribbean and biracial college students who have tackled significant obstacles to achieve success and degrees of self-understanding offers a broader, more hopeful portrait of the adolescent experiences of minority youth. Here are emotionally honest and reflective stories of economic hardship, racial bias, loneliness, and anger--but also of positive role models, spiritual awakening, perseverance, and racial pride. In these essays, students explore the process of self-discovery and the realization of cultural identity. The pieces are accompanied by commentary from prominent African-American scholars, such as Jewelle Taylor Gibbs and Peter C. Murrell, Jr. Together they create a vivid portrait of what it is like to grow up as a black person in America, and offer a springboard to current debates about self-discovery, cultural identity and assimilation. Often raw and painful, always honest and affecting, this collection of personal stories written by young people stands as an eloquent tribute to the courage of today's youth and to the power of their own words.

Amid the flurry of debates about immigration, poverty, and education in the United States, the stories in Mi Voz, Mi Vida allow us to reflect on how young people who might be most affected by the results of these debates actually navigate through American society.The fifteen Latino college students who tell their stories in this book come from a variety of socioeconomic, regional, and family backgrounds—they are young men and women of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, and South American descent. Their insights are both balanced and frank, blending personal, anecdotal, political, and cultural viewpoints. Their engaging stories detail the students' personal struggles with issues such as identity and biculturalism, family dynamics, religion, poverty, stereotypes, and the value of education.Throughout, they provide insights into issues of racial identity in contemporary America among a minority population that is very much in the news. This book gives educators, students, and their families a clear view of the experience of Latino students adapting to a challenging educational environment and a cultural context—Dartmouth College—often very different from their childhood ones.

Mixed presents engaging and incisive first-person experiences of what it is like to be multiracial in what is supposedly a postracial world. Bringing together twelve essays by college students who identify themselves as multiracial, this book considers what this identity means in a reality that occasionally resembles the post-racial dream of some and at other times recalls a familiar world of racial and ethnic prejudice. Exploring a wide range of concerns and anxieties, aspirations and ambitions, these young writers, who all attended Dartmouth College, come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike individuals who define themselves as having one racial identity, these students have lived the complexity of their identity from a very young age. In Mixed, a book that will benefit educators, students, and their families, they eloquently and often passionately reveal how they experience their multiracial identity, how their parents' race or ethnicity shaped their childhoods, and how perceptions of their race have affected their relationships.

"While 9/11 and its aftermath created a traumatic turning point for most of the writers in this book, it is telling that none of their essays begin with that moment. These young people were living, probing, and shifting their Muslim identities long before 9/11.... I’ve heard it said that the second generation never asks the first about its story, but nearly all the essays in this book include long, intimate portrayals of Muslim family life, often going back generations. These young Muslims are constantly negotiating the differences between families for whom faith and culture were matters of honor and North America’s youth culture, with its emphasis on questioning, exploring, and inventing one’s own destiny."-from the Introduction by Eboo PatelIn Growing Up Muslim, Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny present fourteen personal essays by college students of the Muslim faith who are themselves immigrants or are the children of immigrants to the United States. In their essays, the students grapple with matters of ethnicity, religious prejudice and misunderstanding, and what is termed Islamophobia. The fact of 9/11 and subsequent surveillance and suspicion of Islamic Americans (particularly those hailing from the Middle East and the Asian Subcontinent) have had a profound effect on these students, their families, and their communities of origin.

"Those who find themselves living in the Americas, no matter what their ethnic, educational, or economic background, must ultimately 'become their own personalities,' melding their point of view with their points of origin and their places of settlement. For immigrant or refugee families and their children, this 'process of becoming' often means struggling with the contradictions of race, generation, economics, class, work, religion, gender, and sexuality within the family, workplace, or school.... Perhaps nowhere is the struggle more raw, poignant, and moving than in the words of the younger generation at the cusp of such becoming. We readers can also find insights within the candid accounts of their personal lives and in the experiences of their family and friends."—from Balancing Two WorldsBalancing Two Worlds highlights themes surrounding the creation of Asian American identity. This book contains fourteen first-person narratives by Asian American college students, most of whom have graduated during the first five years of the twenty-first century. Their engaging accounts detail the students' very personal struggles with issues of assimilation, gender, religion, sexuality, family conflicts, educational stereotypes, and being labeled the "model minority." Some of the students relate stories drawn from their childhood and adolescent experiences, while others focus more on their college experiences at Dartmouth. Anyone who wants to learn about the changing concept of race in America and what it's like to be a young American of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, or South Asian descent—from educators and college administrators to students and their families—will find Balancing Two Worlds a compelling read and a valuable resource.

Amid the flurry of debates about immigration, poverty, and education in the United States, the stories in Mi Voz, Mi Vida allow us to reflect on how young people who might be most affected by the results of these debates actually navigate through American society.The fifteen Latino college students who tell their stories in this book come from a variety of socioeconomic, regional, and family backgrounds—they are young men and women of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, and South American descent. Their insights are both balanced and frank, blending personal, anecdotal, political, and cultural viewpoints. Their engaging stories detail the students' personal struggles with issues such as identity and biculturalism, family dynamics, religion, poverty, stereotypes, and the value of education.Throughout, they provide insights into issues of racial identity in contemporary America among a minority population that is very much in the news. This book gives educators, students, and their families a clear view of the experience of Latino students adapting to a challenging educational environment and a cultural context—Dartmouth College—often very different from their childhood ones.

"While 9/11 and its aftermath created a traumatic turning point for most of the writers in this book, it is telling that none of their essays begin with that moment. These young people were living, probing, and shifting their Muslim identities long before 9/11.... I’ve heard it said that the second generation never asks the first about its story, but nearly all the essays in this book include long, intimate portrayals of Muslim family life, often going back generations. These young Muslims are constantly negotiating the differences between families for whom faith and culture were matters of honor and North America’s youth culture, with its emphasis on questioning, exploring, and inventing one’s own destiny."-from the Introduction by Eboo PatelIn Growing Up Muslim, Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny present fourteen personal essays by college students of the Muslim faith who are themselves immigrants or are the children of immigrants to the United States. In their essays, the students grapple with matters of ethnicity, religious prejudice and misunderstanding, and what is termed Islamophobia. The fact of 9/11 and subsequent surveillance and suspicion of Islamic Americans (particularly those hailing from the Middle East and the Asian Subcontinent) have had a profound effect on these students, their families, and their communities of origin.

Black Matters presents an anthology of stories of African American and African undergraduate and graduate students’ experiences at college, offering lifespan perspectives on their formative relationships and influences, life-changing events, and the role their heritage has played in shaping their personal identities, values, and choices.Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny bring together contributors who share personal memoirs reflecting on their experience of navigating life on campus as students of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. The ten brave authors, six Black men and four Black women, present thoughtful, often emotional, accounts of moments that transformed their academic, professional, and racial identities. Supplemented by follow-up accounts of four of the graduates, the text underlines developmental perspectives whilst examining what has remained the same about their lives and values, and what has changed over time. The collection explores the notion of hard work and "grit" in overcoming discrimination, racism, and adversity, and how in reality college students who are not part of the racial/cultural majority must contend with the normative identity challenges of late adolescence while carrying the extra burden of "two-ness". Featuring an introduction by Chanté Mouton Kinyon, this anthology examines crucial topics including classroom experience; intellectual stimulation and learning environment; interactions with African American and African students; friendships that crossed the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and how collegiate life affects issues related to personal and racial identities.The rich narratives in Black Matters provide vital insight into the relationship between collegiate experiences and racial identities. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of psychology, education, cultural anthropology, sociology and creative writing, as well as for those responsible for campus climate and student experience.

Black Matters presents an anthology of stories of African American and African undergraduate and graduate students’ experiences at college, offering lifespan perspectives on their formative relationships and influences, life-changing events, and the role their heritage has played in shaping their personal identities, values, and choices.Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny bring together contributors who share personal memoirs reflecting on their experience of navigating life on campus as students of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. The ten brave authors, six Black men and four Black women, present thoughtful, often emotional, accounts of moments that transformed their academic, professional, and racial identities. Supplemented by follow-up accounts of four of the graduates, the text underlines developmental perspectives whilst examining what has remained the same about their lives and values, and what has changed over time. The collection explores the notion of hard work and "grit" in overcoming discrimination, racism, and adversity, and how in reality college students who are not part of the racial/cultural majority must contend with the normative identity challenges of late adolescence while carrying the extra burden of "two-ness". Featuring an introduction by Chanté Mouton Kinyon, this anthology examines crucial topics including classroom experience; intellectual stimulation and learning environment; interactions with African American and African students; friendships that crossed the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and how collegiate life affects issues related to personal and racial identities.The rich narratives in Black Matters provide vital insight into the relationship between collegiate experiences and racial identities. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of psychology, education, cultural anthropology, sociology and creative writing, as well as for those responsible for campus climate and student experience.

"The organizing principle for this anthology is the common Native American heritage of its authors; and yet that thread proves to be the most tenuous of all, as the experience of indigeneity differs radically for each of them. While many experience a centripetal pull toward a cohesive Indian experience, the indications throughout these essays lean toward a richer, more illustrative panorama of difference. What tends to bind them together are not cultural practices or spiritual attitudes per se, but rather circumstances that have no exclusive province in Indian country: that is, first and foremost, poverty, and its attendant symptoms of violence, substance abuse, and both physical and mental illness.... Education plays a critical role in such lives: many of the authors recall adoring school as young people, as it constituted a place of escape and a rare opportunity to thrive.... While many of the writers do return to their tribal communities after graduation, ideas about 'home' become more malleable and complicated."—from the IntroductionI Am Where I Come From presents the autobiographies of thirteen Native American undergraduates and graduates of Dartmouth College, ten of them current and recent students. Twenty years ago, Cornell University Press published First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, also about the experiences of Native American students at Dartmouth College. I Am Where I Come From addresses similar themes and experiences, but it is very much a new book for a new generation of college students.Three of the essays from the earlier book are gathered into a section titled "Continuing Education," each followed by a shorter reflection from the author on his or her experience since writing the original essay. All three have changed jobs multiple times, returned to school for advanced degrees, started and increased their families, and, along the way, continuously revised and refined what it means to be Indian.The autobiographies contained in I Am Where I Come From explore issues of native identity, adjustment to the college environment, cultural and familial influences, and academic and career aspirations. The memoirs are notable for their eloquence and bravery.