Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2019 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54567-9
A complete cataloging-in-publication record is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-231-18478-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-231-18479-3 (paperback)
LCCN 2019002486
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .
Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee
Cover art: Randy Duchaine / Alamy
We would like to thank the contributing authors, the storytellers of this text, for their commitment to this project. Each author persisted through the challenge of constructing meaningful stories about the significant lived experiences of children and youth. It was not an easy undertaking and at times was daunting. Nevertheless, every author rose to the challenge. We owe special thanks to Craig Hughes for his support throughout this project.
Mery F. Diaz and Benjamin Heim Shepard
Why are there so many stories? one of our undergraduate students asked in a college-level human services community organizing class, where we were reading case histories full of personal accounts of individuals and groups creating change.
Great question, we replied in a minor understatement. The other students jumped in.
People learn from stories, one student explained.
I liked the stories, another added.
They bring you into other worlds.
People explain themselves through stories.
We sat listening as other students chimed in, describing what was at stake with the narrative turn being acknowledged in our classroom. Why there are so many narratives is a question we have been asking for years. Peoples lives are grounded in narratives. Creation stories help us find reality. A visceral feeling colors stories that connect individual lives with larger social forces. They allow us into other peoples lives in ways that other forms of data simply do not, enabling us to contemplate experiences of those we are trying to understand, in this case, the lives of children and adolescents.
From the moment we humans were able to communicate through gestures and sounds, and eventually spoken and written words, we have told stories (Jones 1996). Notes novelist Amy Hoffman, We tell stories to give life meaning. We impose structure on chaos. We choose a beginning and an end; we elevate some details and discard others; we try to find lessons and useful information (quoted in Becker 2017). Through narrative, we make sense of the world. We explain who we are and where we have been while providing direction for the future: we use narratives to tell the stories of our lives. The big we, of course, extends into the lives of children, who spend their childhood weaving tales, stretching truths, and making meaning with stories, as they navigate the more playful and difficult times of their lives. As we get older, we tell different kinds of stories, often less interesting ones. Sometimes we remember those old stories, elaborating on them to make sense of things, retracing details of who we are and how we got here.
After all, one of the prominent cultural narratives of our time is that of childhood. Writes Adam Phillips (2014, 43),
Childhood was a story adults make up about themselves. It was to be the story that caught on. And psychoanalysis would catch on as a story about why stories about childhood matter. Freud was to make up a story about adult life out of a story about childhood; a story about development out of a story of assimilation. A story about civilization out of a story about immigration.
Today, a new paradigm, the social study of childhood, suggests we recognize that stories of children are not just about memories of what was or about what comes after. Rather, they are about complex lived experiences, in the here and now, and these stories can be told by children themselves (McNamee 2016; Corsaro 2015; Nybell, Shook, and Finn 2009; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998).
Every day, in all parts of the world, young people are crafting amazing stories. These are stories of children and teens who could not just go along to get along or accept the worlds injustices as they are or wereof those who ignited the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s and who recently engaged in civil disobedience to protest congressional inaction to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. It is the story of high school students in Hong Kong in 2014, who endured tear gas in their struggle for democracy during a two-and-a-half-month occupation of the financial district, in defiance of the same Communist Party that had literally rolled tanks over protestors a quarter-century earlier (Sheehan 2014). These stories capture the spirit of the U.S. high school students, such as Emma Gonzalez, who called BS on the National Rifle Association and the U.S. gun lobby, igniting a wave of students walkouts and civic engagement that left a former Supreme Court Judge contemplating the repeal of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (Stevens 2018). Or the persistence of Black Lives Matter youth organizers, who fight for the recognition of their humanity while their communities experience brutality at the hands of the state in the forms of racialized police violence, environmental neglect, and a myriad of other injustices. Or Greda Thunberg, 16, who started skipping school on Fridays to go to the Swedish parliament to condemn inaction and lobby it to do something about climate change; as we completed the edits for this book in March 2019, 1.4 million young people and a few grownups, including us, in 123 cities around the world, followed her lead and joined her act of civil disobedience. From Snapchats and videos, from tweets to podcasts, from punk to hip-hop, and from street art to direct action, young people channel the potency of stories as forces in social change, cultural resistance, and self-expression. These actions remind us that youth themselves are active agents in their own lives.
Agency, of course, is not always expressed through outward subversion or revolt, but also appears in the sensitive and ordinary ways in which children and youth negotiate the circumstances of their lives. We can see agency when youth reconstruct family through new peer relationships or with social workers when their biological ones are unavailable. We can see agency in the ways in which young people develop new identities by taking traditions from their homeland and integrating them with the new cultural norms of their adopted countries. Or through childrens resilience as they cope and heal from trauma, becoming anew and full of possibilities. We can also see the boundaries of their agency tested by the social forces of poverty and inequality, exclusion, discrimination, and oppression. Consider the tragedy and trauma of family separations at the U.S. border or the staggering education inequality of U.S. public schools, which both widen the academic achievement gap for poor children of color and contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.
