Brill Research Perspectives in Global Youth – Serie

The main gaol of this book is to discuss the place and role of video games in contemporary societies and their impact on individual relationships. It analyses how the development of video games is a sign of and a factor in the democratization of modern societies. Judit Vari explores how video games contribute to the moral and political socialization of children and teenagers. The book is structured into two parts. The first explores the methodological, ethical and epistemological implications of Games Studies, and shows how the development of an independent field of research on video games can be analyzed as a sign of democratization. The second part focuses on youth identity experimentations and how video games can contribute to the democratization of social relations. She discusses play inequalities, but also how video games are reconfiguring family and peer relationships, thereby influencing the movement of democratization of societies.

This book is an introduction to the role played by Spanish formal education in providing feminist pedagogies to adolescents and young people, throughout the first two decades of the 21st century. The images of Spanish feminist protests in recent years, with a considerable presence of young girls but also boys, have spread around the world. But what is their relationship with gender-based inequalities? What is the role of formal education in their understanding of social reality? The authors combine a sociological and historical analysis of the social and educational changes that have taken place in Spanish youth during these decades, with a pedagogical orientation towards practice.

The situation of young people in Europe has been significantly impacted by recent changes that have taken place in the job market. Young people’s life trajectories and transitions to adulthood are increasingly less linear, more segmented, and more reversible, with a rise in unemployment and the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) phenomenon. This book aims to investigate the youth policies implemented in Europe and how they are integrated in the socio-economic contexts of the various member states and their welfare regimes, educational systems, and skills markets. A significant number of young adults neither study nor work, and live in a constant state of discouragement and inactivity, giving up on their search for job opportunities. The strategic choices implemented at the European level in response to this problem promote ALMPs (Active Labour Market Policies), including the creation of the Youth Guarantee Program, which is examined here both at the European level and, specifically, in the Italian context.

After a 35 year-long career on worldwide TV screens, Lieutenant Columbo has become one of the most famous fictional detectives. Lilian Mathieu shows that the Columbo series owes its success to its implicit but formidable political dimension, as each episode is structured as a class struggle between a rich, famous, cultured or powerful criminal and an apparently humble and blunderer police officer dressed in a crumpled raincoat and driving an antique car. Highlighting the contentious context that gave birth to the series in 1968, he shows that the sociology of culture offers intellectual tools to understand how a TV detective story can be appreciated as a joyful class revenge.

In China, a process of compressed socialization of youth is characterized by multiple spatial, professional and social mobilities. Young skilled Chinese move and circulate to improve their qualification and education levels in order to develop upward social mobility’s trajectories. Young low-skilled migrants’ biographic pathways are structured around spatial discontinuities and horizontal social mobilities. In labor markets, the phenomenon of structural disqualification impacts young Chinese and the risk of downward social mobility has affected the young middle-class. Platforms appear as new spaces of commodification and subordination that produce a cybertariat. In Chinese mega-cities, social inequalities and urban boundaries do promote segregation and marginalization, while at the same time, young Chinese entrepreneurs are developing international networks and economic cosmopolitanism. Chinese youth are crossing transnational spaces wherein identities are redefined through a process of cultural creolization.