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1 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ “There Are Birds in the Projects” The Ecology of Adolescent Development in Urban America It is an early June evening in the Midwest, the kind of afternoon that suggests the end of school and the beginning of summer. The energy at the East Side Boys and Girls Club reflects this boundary land between structure and freedom, work and play. In the gym, the boys’ softball team practices in preparation for the summer season. In the computer room, teenagers are working on final school reports and browsing the latest sneaker styles online. Scuffling feet and adolescent chatter fill the hallway as teens escape the heat emanating from the concrete expanse of the nearby public housing project. Inside the empty TV lounge, BJ and I sit, an African American teen and a White woman, shoulder to shoulder. Her 16-year-old body, athletic and strong, claims its space next to mine. Photographs are scattered across the table in front of us, the bright faces of BJ and her friends contrasting with the solemn tones of the buildings and landscapes of their urban neighborhood. One particular photo catches my eye. “What about this one?” I ask, pointing to a photo that shows nothing but sky and, in its center, a soaring bird (Figure 1-1). “Why did you take that one?” “Cause you wouldn’t usually see, people think of the projects as 2 ❙ “There Are Birds in the Projects” bad,” BJ says, looking me in the eye. “And that you wouldn’t see birds or anything over here. So that’s why I took that.” BJ’s words strike me as both profound and obvious, hopeful and sad. In them I hear the echoes of media images of public housing projects like the one just outside the club’s doors, of teens like BJ and her friends. But I also hear her resistance, her defiant response to those who would pigeonhole her and her home. And in the intersection of those two streams of consciousness, I glimpse her developing sense of identity, a self who exists within, but refuses to be defined by, her place in America’s urban landscape. BJ does not speak for all teens growing up in America’s inner-city public housing. But she and her peers at the East Side Boys and Girls Club provide us a glimpse of how settings become sites for resistance and reconstruction , for recognition and relationships. Their narratives demonstrate the active, contextual, and relational nature of adolescent identity in today’s complex world. Adolescents are in the process of exploring who they are, of envisioning and building a place for themselves in adult society . They are both individuating and socializing, separating and forming links. And they are doing so within multiple, overlapping social environments . American teens interact within and across an increasing number of contexts, from home to school to neighborhood to cyberspace. Yet too Fig. 1-1. BJ’s Photo: The Bird in the Projects “There Are Birds in the Projects” ❙ 3 often our portraits of adolescence take on one of two extremes: erasure of the environment or dismissal of the teen’s own agency. In our attempts to understand adolescence as a universal phenomenon we have overlooked the nuanced ways in which development is intimately tied to the interaction of individual youth with particular people within specific social contexts. Understanding the ways in which adolescents make meaning in and of their contexts, both local and societal, is key to understanding the process of adolescent development in 21st-century America. Only when equipped with such understanding can we support and promote positive developmental processes for all teens. And so it is with a desire to further such understanding that I offer up the stories of the East Side teens. Teens with whom I spent four years talking, playing, and learning. Teens who have much to say, and from whom we have lots to learn, about the process of development as they experience it within their mostly Black, economically poor, inner-city neighborhood. My purpose in this book is twofold. First, and primarily, I seek to push forward developmental theory, specifically in the area of adolescent identity development. I challenge researchers to reformulate our consideration of individuation as the primary goal of adolescence. In the split between psychological and sociological views of the self, the former of which focuses on individual processes, the latter on structural constraints, the middle ground of interpersonal connections often gets lost in the shuffle. Yet we...

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