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This title investigates the coming-of-age genre as a significant phenomenon in New Zealand's national cinema, tracing its development and elucidating its role in cultural change. With chapters on landmark films like 'An Angel at My Table', 'Heavenly Creatures', 'Once Were Warriors and Boy', this book explores the influence of the French New Wave and European art cinema, and examines the dialogue between national cinema and a nation's literature. Looking at the characteristics of an indigenous 'Fourth Cinema,' as well as different perspectives on gendered and sexual identities, 'Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand' considers the evidence that these films provide of significant cultural shifts that have taken place or are in the process of taking place as New Zealanders' discover their emerging national identity.

32 years after her first season as a Counsellor in Training, an alum returns to the grounds of the summer camp now celebrating its 80th anniversary. THE POINT is a paddle through the pond of memory. A film that invites you to explore the bonds, initiation, connection, continuity, and self-discovery that occurs in the special community that is summer camp. It's a testament to the passing of the flame from adolescents to their future adult selves. THE POINT is the cradle of our character.

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: West Virginia In questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000 . ... From “No Trespassing” It’s me who worries about her mini-strokes and falls, the knot on her head from where she stumbled picking blackberries on the bank. She watches the bees come, stippling themselves with pollen, flowers bending in the breeze. This world is hers, for now—all she covets. Tonight it is a black bear and three cubs up against her window, spilling seeds from a bird feeder hung against the house. My mother stands in the dark by that window, her thin hand, the chill of ghostly glass.

Background Quantifying the impact on COVID‐19 transmission from a single event has been difficult due to the virus transmission dynamics, such as lag from exposure to reported infection, non‐linearity arising from the person‐to‐person transmission, and the modifying effects of non‐pharmaceutical interventions over time. To address these issues, we aimed to estimate the COVID‐19 transmission risk of social events focusing on the Japanese Coming‐of‐Age Day and Coming‐of‐Age ceremony in which “new adults” practice risky behavior on that particular day. Methods Using national surveillance data in Japan in 2021 and 2022, we conducted difference‐in‐differences regression against COVID‐19 incidences by setting “new adults” cases as the treatment group and the cases 1 year younger or older than these “new adults” as the control group. In addition, we employed a triple differences approach to estimate the risk of holding the Coming‐Age ceremony by using a binary variable regarding the presence or absence of the ceremony in each municipality. Results We estimated the relative risks (RRs) of the Coming‐of‐Age Day as 1.27 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.02–1.57) in 2021 and 3.22 (95% CI 2.68–3.86) in 2022. The RR of the Coming‐of‐Age ceremony was also large, estimated as 2.83 (1.81–4.43) in 2022. Conclusions When planning large social events, it is important to be aware of the unique risks associated with these gatherings, along with effective public health messages to best communicate these risks.

Geri, 18, is a Bulgarian girl living in an orphanage in Vratza and finishing high school. With graduation approaching, she faces a turning point—she must leave the orphanage and enter adulthood alone. As she prepares, Geri revisits her painful past with her stepbrother: domestic violence, abandonment, and the mystery of why she wasn’t placed in foster care. She debates whether to invite her estranged mother to the prom, while also facing the return of a boyfriend who once urged her to quit school and move to Germany. Prom night brings joy, but new challenges lie ahead. Can Geri overcome her past, or will she repeat old mistakes in new ways?

Children of the Rainforest explores the lives of children growing up in a time of radical change in Amazonia. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Matses, a group of hunter-gatherer forest dwellers who have lived in voluntary isolation until fairly recently. Having worked with them for over a decade, returning every year to their villages in the rainforest, Camilla Morelli follows closely the life-trajectories of Matses children, watching them shift away from the forest-based lifestyles of their elders and move towards new horizons crisscrossed by concrete paving, lit by the glow of electric lights and television screens, and centered around urban practices and people. The book uses drawings and photographs taken by the children themselves to trace the children's journeys-lived and imagined-from their own perspectives, proposing an ethnographic analysis that recognizes children's imaginations, play, and shifting desires as powerful catalysts of social change.

Over the decades, the lines separating young- middle-aged-, and older adults have blurred, as indicated by a broadening of the appropriate years for making life decisions. Not only are many people marrying later, but some are marrying earlier than ever. Overall, women giving birth later, but some are having children earlier in their lives. Older people are retiring later, but some are retiring at a younger age. The spread or variability (standard deviation) of age-based decisions has increased substantially, giving adults greater freedom from the traditional constraints of age. With these relaxed age norms has come a host of related social problems. The relaxation of age norms for adult decision-making has inadvertently blurred the boundaries between adults and teenagers, between teenagers and children. This generalization of the phenomenon throughout the life cycle is responsible for the adultification of childhood. Eight year old girls are, to an increasing extent, being treated as sexual objects; bullying peaks in the 6th grade; larger numbers of girls are having oral sex or sexual intercourse by the age of 15; the pregnancy rate for girls 13-15 is on the rise; we are in the process of dismantling the juvenile justice system in favor of adult forms of punishment; and more and more children are left without adult supervision in the afternoons, as though they were miniature adults who are capable of raising themselves. Jack Levin is the American Sociological Association's 2009 Winner of the \"Public Understanding of Sociology\" Award. This short book communicates the power and importance of sociological thinking to major, worldwide social trends. Ideal for use in undergraduate courses such as introductory sociology, social problems, and social change as well as more advanced courses in population, or sociology of aging.

Eighteen. Twenty-one. Sixty-five. In America today, we recognize these numbers as key transitions in our lives-precise moments when our rights and opportunities change-when we become eligible to cast a vote, buy a drink, or enroll in Medicare.This volume brings together scholars of childhood, adulthood, and old age to explore how and why particular ages have come to define the rights and obligations of American citizens. Since the founding of the nation, Americans have relied on chronological age to determine matters as diverse as who can marry, work, be enslaved, drive a car, or qualify for a pension. Contributors to this volume explore what meanings people in the past ascribed to specific ages and whether or not earlier Americans believed the same things about particular ages as we do. The means by which Americans imposed chronological boundaries upon the variable process of growing up and growing old offers a paradigmatic example of how people construct cultural meaning and social hierarchy from embodied experience. Further, chronological age always intersects with other socially constructed categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, taking up a variety of distinct subcultures-from frontier children and antebellum slaves to twentieth-century Latinas-Age in America makes a powerful case that age has always been a key index of citizenship.

In Makuck's fourth collection of short stories he once again explores the fertile territory of small, rural American towns. With tenderness and clarity, he excavates the mundane surface of everyday lives to reveal compassionate characters who are unexpectedly vulnerable. The stories inWins and Lossesare set in a car, a courtroom, a university English department, a sports bar, a jetliner, a laundromat. Characters struggle with regret, desire, expectations, and a need to win when loss is inevitable. A high school student whose father was killed in a car crash and who can speak openly only to his girlfriend delivers prescriptions for a pharmacy and learns much about people and values in the course of his deliveries. A lawyer recalls a dubious family friend, an undercover cop, who pressured him as a young boy toward guns and football. A recent widow finds a cardboard box on her front porch only to discover it contains the body of her dog. A young woman takes her mother to a cardiologist and, while in the waiting room, gets into an argument with a wealthy political conservative at great cost to both of them. In the tradition of Cheever and Updike, Makuck's stories give us characters struggling with questions of what really matters.

Told through a series of quirky, irreverent short stories and letters home during the early 1980s, The Deaf Heart chronicles a year in the life of Dempsey \"Max\" McCall, a Deaf biomedical photography resident at a teaching hospital on the island of Galveston, Texas. Max strives to become certified as a Registered Biological Photographer while straddling the deaf and hearing worlds. He befriends Reynaldo, an impoverished Deaf Mexican, and they go on a number of unusual escapades around the island. At the hospital, Max has to contend with hearing doctors, nurses, scientists, and teachers. While struggling through the rigors of his residency and running into bad luck in meeting women, Max discovers an ally in his hearing housemate Zag, a fellow resident who is also vying for certification. Toward the end of his residency, Max meets Maddy, a Deaf woman who helps bring balance to his life. Author Willy Conley's stories, some humorous, some poignant, reveal Max's struggles and triumphs as he attempts to succeed in the hearing world while at the same time navigating the multicultural and linguistic diversity within the Deaf world.