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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Tilton, Jennifer. "Dangerous and Endangered Children: Representations of Youth and Political Struggles to Shape the State and the City," Anthropology and American Culture, University of Michigan, May 2004.
My dissertation asks how fears of youth and fears for youth have transformed urban politics and urban spaces in the late 20th century. To answer this question, I conducted two and one half years of fieldwork in Oakland, California within a series of political mobilizations to define the needs and problems of youth. I argue that recent political, economic and social transformations have disrupted the security of key cultural categories like childhood, youth and adulthood and prompted a wide range of political mobilizations to secure the increasingly problematic boundaries of these categories. The ways youth are represented as dangerous and endangered within these diverse political mobilization have had deep material effects, shaping the physical spaces in which youth live, the life chances of young people, and the form of the state. I argue that these mobilizations are shaped body by Oakland’s complex social geography and by the structures of the local state. Focusing primarily on political mobilizations by black and white parents and activists, I examine the ways class, race and gender condition local fears of and for youth. To understand how these complex fears translate into political action, however, I argue that we must attend to the way political mobilizations intersect with the structures of the local state, from the city’s community policing initiative, to school reform efforts to the country’s juvenile justice system. I argue that the bodies of children and youth are at the center of divergent contemporary political projects to reshape the state in late capitalism. I emphasize the ways contemporary state transformations emerge out of social struggles to define youth needs and problems, while also highlighting the significant power of the state both in shaping our understandings of youth and in structuring the possibilities for political action.
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