Book Review: ACT YOUR AGE! A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF ADOLESCENCE (2012) Nancy Lesko (original) (raw)

Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. Critical Social Thought. Second Edition

Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2012

In her book, Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, Nancy Lesko argues that adolescence is socially constructed within a historical and cultural context that frames the way that much of the world looks at youth. Lesko's central question is: "What are the systems of ideas that 'make' possible the adolescence that we see, think, feel and act upon?" (p. 8). This invites a consideration of notions of youth present in American modern culture using post-structural, feminist and post-colonial theoretical frameworks. As a social worker engaged in outreach with youth, this book provides me an opportunity to step back and examine how I think about the population I have been working with. Although Lesko's primary audience may be professionals involved in education, Act Your Age! creates an opportunity for anyone engaged with youth to explore how foundational theorists such as Stanley Hall, Sigmund Freud, and Erik Erikson have framed adolescence. Lesko also gives the reader an opportunity to engage with critical theorists including Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhaba, and Franz Fanon, using their concepts to unravel the concept of youth. The book traces two dominant understandings of adolescence. First, the biological view assumes that youth aged 12 to 18 have naturally occurring, biologically generated characteristics, behaviours, and needs. Lesko argues that youth are viewed as hormonally overwhelmed, growth-spurting individuals outside of society and history. The developmental framework, discussed in stages of cognitive, psychosocial, or pubertal

Book Review - Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (2012)

International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, 2014

Marked Lives, Dreamed lives 21 century Adolescents back to Dialogue 31 01 2019 en-2.pdf

What makes the co--construction of a new alliance between school--adolescents--family and territory topical, necessary, vital and imperative? The 21 st century started with one of the most significant and profound educational emergencies of all times. The following elements characterize this crisis: --the progressive loss of trust in the institutions and in the adult world; --the disruption of communities and the solitude of families; --the absence of new paradigms able to interpret and face changes under way, with the subsequent poor awareness of the impact on young generations and on the planet of the two revolutions under way: digital and biotechnological. The fourth revolution, as Luciano Floridi defines it (2018), which is transforming the world, does not find any critical space yet in educational curricula. A sort of "anthropological mutation" of digital adolescents is taking place which may appear as a surprise to the world of adults and in particular to all those who are in charge of education. A dialogue--based approach can represent an effective "counter--device" capable of fighting dementia and digital solitude , and of contributing to co--construct a new educational alliance based on responsibility, commitment and understanding. Dialogue is an inclusive practice where the entire educational community is involved, which is generously, carefully and profoundly listening to adolescents. Dialogue, as a bridge with and between generations, develops higher awareness and critical skills with respect to the continuous and sudden changes under way and provides the ability to imagine the future. In this article, the possibility to co--construct a new educational alliance between schoolstudents - families - territory is analysed. School managers and teachers, "coach facilitators" of this process, are in charge of generating dialogue, facilitating it and keeping it open. change that has occurred in Italy as the transition from the regulatory to the affective family. 4 The first was characterized by formal and distant relations, by precise role definitions and by a robust paternal authority aimed at passing on values, rules and principles, that required obedience, submission and conformism. This meant that children felt a strong desire for freedom, also characterized by a high level of conflict. All this has disappeared. The affective family, the modern one, is characterized by the central role of children and by an over-investment in them. Relations are characterized by a symmetry of roles and by complicity with a major reduction in intergenerational conflicts. The parent's objective is to supply love, support, safety, meeting all needs. Children, in this family, are hyper--protected, barely exposed to frustrations, and this makes them particularly fragile and vulnerable. It is absolutely necessary to avoid that children suffer damage, that they feel offended, that the image that has been patiently built of them is questioned. They are fragile children because they are exposed to the disappointment resulting from the gap between expectations of acknowledgement and the real treatment by teachers, peers, and parents. Fragile because they are pained by humiliation and by the risk of being too often ashamed of their body and of their, sometimes unsolvable, social invisibility. The world of school is stiff, rigid and this has caused a sharp divide between the school and adolescents. With its current model, the school is not able to "engage" adolescents. Why do adolescents not see the school as an opportunity for self--fulfilment rather than, often, as a boring obstacle in their life? They certainly no longer assign a historical or symbolic meaning to the school, nor an institutional meaning. Without these meanings, a teacher entering class no longer represents anything but himself in the eyes of the child, and everyday he must laboriously regain his authority. Also having an effect is the fact that parents, in the first place, when exercising their parental function, have emptied their role of symbolic meanings. If the family has left children to define the rules of the family, they will try to dictate the rules also at school. Without this symbolic meaning assigned to the school, an adolescent does not feel any guilt and is not afraid of any punishment by the school. Ethics has been superseded by appearance. During classes, an adolescent ignores what is happening, because he is working on the creation and maintenance of his image, adapting his body to it, with the only purpose of becoming popular at school, in his community; it is not the most skilled who will be rewarded, but the "coolest" who will pass all competitions. An adolescent lives in a state of lack of confidence in himself and in the future. School is increasingly perceived as a sort of hypermarket that must satisfy "customers", who will be ready to state their case because, after all, customers are always right. A teacher can regenerate the relationship, can still attract and affect adolescents with passion more than with severity, with the richness and beauty of knowledge, through the emotions and the erotic in the learning-teaching process, already mentioned by Plato. 5 Not falling in love as an experience that emulates the symbiosis between mother and child, that feeds on filling an absence, but love which is an active, creative and generative movement. 6 The methods used matter and make the difference, it is necessary to establish a learning environment that connects with adolescents. School must respect what the student already is, without any will to change him, to destroy the project that he has about himself. True school reform should be made around relationships. Adolescents seek and need adults at home and at school. Also systematic bullying finds nourishment in loneliness, in the lack of authoritative adults of reference, in the inability to set up relationships outside the virtual world. Cyber-bullying is violent because it is very fast and extensive. School, in terms of educational alliance, is a location which is always there and active, that can have the bully perceive himself as a resource for his schoolmates, that can dismantle fears and set up significant networks 4 Charmet, P. (2010) Fragile e Spavaldo. Ritratto dell'adolescente di oggi, Roma-Bari, Laterza 5 Platone, (1995) Simposio, intr. di U. Galimberti, trad. e cura di F. Zanatta, Milano, Feltrinelli 6 Recalcati, M. (2014) L'ora di lezione. Per un'erotica dell'insegnamento, Torino, Einaudi

Commentary: Youthful concerns: Movement, belonging, and modernity

Pragmatics, 2010

This commentary explores the links between language, modernity, and young people's movementwithin nations and across borders. Given the scope and pace of globalization and transnational migration, this movement has created a good deal of local and national anxiety over how youth are negotiating their rights to belong -in schools, in cities, and in nation-states. The commentary addresses how youth must be understood as specifically modern subjects, in Foucault's sense of the term, including how they both utilize and trouble the binary categories associated with modernity, the ways that modern young subjects are constructed through discourses of sexuality, and the ways that young people are disciplined in specific social spaces. In addition to the possibility of hybridity and invention suggested by the juxtaposition of family and peer cultural traditions, the commentary asks how new youth styles also involve the disciplining of youthful bodies by institutions, family members, and peers.

Culture, Development and Adolescence – towards a Theory and History of Adolescence

Ethics in progress, 2024

The present study identifies specifics of adolescence by reconstructing the cultural-historical process of the emergence of this age, which is essentially connected to modernity, by means of two epochal works of art from the years 1719 (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) and 1774 (Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) which are reflected upon using terms derived from development theory. This study bases its conclusions on a summary theoretical model of adolescence as the awakening of subjectivity, with critical consideration given of current tendencies in dealing with and shaping adolescence. The potential associated with this stage of life as represented amid the unleashing of modernity seems to be decreasing again in its neoliberal late phase. It seems instead to be replaced by empty stagings and conjuration of creativity.

Adolescence, rites of passage and future society

In the last century, a certain vision on the adolescence served to explain the role of adolescence as age of the "passage" in the social and cultural process of intergenerational turnover. Facing the "crisis of the educational milieu" of the Twentieth Century, the evolutionary categories of psychobiological theories appear unusable to understand the peculiarities of adolescence in change of the contemporary scene. This article proposes not to speak more in general terms of "adolescence", but to query the material and symbolic properties that support the experiential structure of what we call "doing experience of adolescence" in concrete, every day.From here, we can argue in a new way the question of the "future" as existential horizon. No longer as construction and outcome of an "ability to transit", but as recognition of a "liminalcompetence" that allows youths to do experience and to construct meaning in uncertainty. The specificity of adolescence contemporary seems to consist in this trait.

Book Review: ACT YOUR AGE! A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF ADOLESCENCE (2012) Nancy Lesko (original) (raw)

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