Majoring in Change

Allison Butler is Lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a media educator and media education researcher.

«Facebook is, increasingly, where adolescents are in today’s world. Allison Butler’s book finds a group of young people from underprivileged backgrounds and explores the means by which they use the social networking site to connect: with her as both researcher and, in some cases, former teacher; with each other through the details of daily life as well as life’s more cataclysmic moments; and – perhaps most importantly – with their developing and everchanging sense of themselves. The rich interview data shed light on the role of Facebook and other social networking sites in the lives of the young...interview subjects. Yet the data also reveal much more about the positionality of these young adults within larger social, political, cultural, and educational contexts. The result is a series of critical insights gleaned by the author – many wry and witty – on such pressing contemporary subjects as neoliberalism and its continued threats to the public school system in the United States and on the nature of the transition between adolescence and adulthood as played out in (and as shaped by) a digital media world.» (Erica Scharrer, Professor, Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)