Personal Note to Reader

I’ve been teaching issues related to lifespan changes for over 4 decades. I was moved to write the book because I found that there was no textbook currently available in the market that I felt covered the topics from a broad multi-disciplinary, multicultural and critical perspective.  There are some good textbooks that I’ve used in the past, but they mainly covered the important issues affecting young people from a dominant biological-psychological framework.  Thus, adolescence is typically considered universal and if there are manifest differences in how young people live out their years, the differences were in social factors that influences the trajectory but did not change the essential qualities of being an adolescent   This was deeply unsatisfactory to me.  There were researchers currently working in the social sciences who questioned these assumptions and offered other frameworks to engage with the topic of adolescence.  In addition, my personal experiences growing up in India made me question some of the theories proposing universal trajectories of growth.

Historians of childhood were exploring the major historical factors that influenced the concept of childhood and adolescence and the frameworks established to understand them.  Sociologists were engaging in ethnographic research with youth participants in the many settings where they were living and functioning and were discovering that adolescence is not one phenomenon but multiple experiences.  While cross-cultural researchers within psychology were asking these questions, they did little to interrogate the concept of adolescence itself.  Political scientists were exploring the role of youth as citizens and as populations that one term as oppressed, in that they had few rights that adults had and few protections that children had. Poststructuralists used theory and language to interrogate the notion of adolescence itself and established that the term was a product of industrialization, especially the early years of the industrial revolution and colonialism.  They wrote about how language that framed adolescence was often used to control a vulnerable population at a time when science served as a colonial project to subdue whole populations.

All these new questions and frameworks were missing from the standard account of adolescence in major textbooks.  I started writing the essays you are about to read for my own students.  I had been using them for a few years and my students loved what I had introduced to them; I felt it was time to formally publish for others who were seeking a more comprehensive framework to view adolescence but who had no time to write a book for their students. I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.