Studying Generations

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The concept of ‘generations’ has become a widely discussed area, with recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic revealing our dependence on intergenerational relationships both within and beyond the family. However, the concept can often be misunderstood, which can fuel divisions between age groups rather than generating solutions. This collection introduces and explores the growing field of generational studies, providing a comprehensive overview of its strengths and limitations. With contributions from academics across a range of disciplines, the book showcases the concept’s interdisciplinary potential by applying a generational lens to fields including sociology, literature, history, psychology, media studies and politics. Offering fresh perspectives, this original collection is a valuable addition to the field, opening new avenues for generational thinking.

There is currently much discourse about generations in the public sphere. A sequence of letters conflates generations and age cohorts born in the last few decades (generation “X”, “Y” or “Z”) as well as multiple categories are used to describe today’s young people as a generation that is distinct from its predecessors. Despite the popularity of generational labels in media, politics, or even academia, the use of generation as a conceptual tool in youth studies has been controversial. This Special Issue allows readers to better understand the key issues regarding the use of generation as a theoretical concept and/or as a social category in the field of youth studies, shedding light on the controversies, trends, and cautions that go through it.

This collection explores generational studies, showcasing its interdisciplinary potential in sociology, literature, history, psychology, media studies and politics. It offers fresh perspectives and opens new avenues for generational thinking.

ÔThere is so much to praise in this important and timely book. Drawing on unique, fresh and intimate qualitative studies of families and the complex histories of their lives and businesses, the book will invigorate entrepreneurial studies with its intricate, theoretically bold and innovative analysis. The author takes us on a sensitive and fascinating journey with these families, and makes an outstanding contribution conceptually, politically, ethically and methodologically to the field, showing us how narratives are not simply methodological tools but ontological resources for gender and identify formation. It is an elegant and refreshing book which will be a rewarding and enlivening read for students and researchers.Õ Ð Elaine Swan, University of Technology Sydney, Australia ÔThoughtful, perceptive, and meticulously researched, Eleanor HamiltonÕs Entrepreneurship across Generations is an important contribution that will help advance the field of family business studies both conceptually and empirically. Based on fascinating field work with families in business and placing ÒfamilyÓ at the very heart of her study, Hamilton shows, through the stories her subjects tell, just how deeply and complexly family and firm are intertwined. A must-read for all those interested in family firm entrepreneurship.Õ Ð Andrew Popp, University of Liverpool Management School, UK Entrepreneurship across Generations examines dimensions of identity, gender and learning to understand the complex fabric of family business. An interpretation of narratives from two generations in five families constitutes entrepreneurship as an inherently social, rather than individual, phenomenon. This enriching book explains how entrepreneurial capacity is shared between generations, showing how learning is embedded within everyday social practice in the family and the business. It explores patriarchal practice and gendered entrepreneurial identities in family business. The author challenges dominant discourses of entrepreneurship. She argues that entrepreneurial identities are mediated by narrative and subject to constant negotiation within and across generations. With a new perspective on entrepreneurship, this insightful study will be essential and supplementary reading for students and practitioners within the field of entrepreneurship and family business.

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.

Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.

In this national bestseller, David A. Robertson “weaves an engrossing and unforgettable story with the precision of a historian and the colour of a true Indigenous storyteller." (Rosanna Deerchild) 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga is an epic, four-part graphic novel. Illustrated in vivid colour, the story follows one Indigenous family over three centuries and seven generations. This compiled edition was originally published as a series of four graphic novels: Stone, Scars, Ends/Begins, and The Pact. Stone introduces Edwin, a young man who must discover his family’s past if he is to have any future. Edwin learns of his ancestor Stone, a young Plains Cree man, who came of age in the early 19th century. When his older brother is tragically killed during a Blackfoot raid, Stone, the best shot and rider in his encampment, must overcome his grief to avenge his brother’s death. In Scars, the story of White Cloud, Edwin's ancestor, is set against the smallpox epidemic of 1870-1871. After witnessing the death of his family one by one, White Cloud must summon the strength to find a new home and deliver himself from the terrible disease. In Ends/Begins, readers learn about the story of Edwin’s father, and his experiences in a residential school. In 1964, two brothers are taken from the warm and loving care of their grandparents, and spirited away to a residential school. When older brother James discovers the anguish that his brother is living under, it leads to unspeakable tragedy. In The Pact, the guilt and loss of James’s residential school experiences follow him into adulthood, and his life spirals out of control. Edwin, mired in his own pain, tries to navigate past the desolation of his fatherless childhood. As James tries to heal himself he begins to realize that, somehow, he must save his son’s life—as well as his own. When father and son finally meet, can they heal their shattered relationship, and themselves, or will it be too late? Find ideas for using this book in your classroom in the FREE Teacher’s Guide for 7 Generations.

This book is about how traumatic psychological injury is passed down to the children and grandchildren of those who originally experienced it and about finding the shared humanity in families, in psychotherapy, in society, and in memories of the past that repairs the damage people do to one another.