I owe gratitude to many others for the help they gave me as part of writing groups, as members of my dissertation committee, and as meaningful presences in my life offering various types of inspiration along the way. Thanks to Mandy Tröger, Alexandra Calvallaro, and Rebecca Crist, award-winning members of the powerful TCB writing group; to Trixie DeMaria for inspiring this book; to Dvera...

I am sitting across the table from 14-year-old LaToya in her family’s kitchen. Out the window behind her, the road bends by her front yard to loop through her housing development, veering away from the low, blonde cornfield spreading as far as the eye can see.

The school bell rings, announcing the end of the day. From my car, I scan faces as students pour out of the doors of Brown High School in pairs and ambling groups, climbing steps to board one of the four waiting buses or heading for a truck or car in the parking lot (the makeup of the lot has the odds leaning toward a truck). I am looking for Marcin, but she is nowhere to be found. The vehicles in...

It is an unseasonably hot early Friday spring afternoon when I drive to meet Annie for our fourth formal interview. On the way, I race alongside tractors moving over rich brown fields, leaving streaks of dark, overturned earth in their wake. The area has just come out of one of its warmest winters on record and, as the mild weather spills over into April, the land blooms with colors and activity.

I am sitting at the corner of a wooden desk facing 17-year-old Noel. It is mid fall, and we are in a janitor’s closet in the basement of her high school talking loudly to be heard over the pounding from boys’ afterschool basketball practice in the gym above us. I first met Noel two months ago. At that first meeting, Noel came across as serious and reserved. She responded to my...

I pull my car into the empty gravel lot and park next to a freestanding metal sign with vinyl letters announcing on both sides “Plow’s Family Restaurant—Open Tu 6–8, W 5–8, F 6–9.” “The Plow,” as I am told it is called, occupies an unfussy, white concrete block building on the edge of town. Fields run to the horizons on one side of the...

Contrary to notions of teens being at-risk, studies of youth victimization find that teens in the US are safer today than they have been in the past decade. An analysis of data collected by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics concluded that, in...

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Aimee Rickman is assistant professor of child and family sciences at California State University, Fresno, where she heads the Youth and Social Media Lab. She is an ethnographer and critical researcher of adolescence, girlhood, technology, and culture.