As we experience and manipulate time—be it as boredom or impatience—it becomes an object: something materialized and social, something that affects perception, or something that may motivate reconsideration and change. The editors and contributors to this important new book, Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality, have provided a diverse collection of ethnographic studies and theoretical explorations of youth experiencing time in a variety of contemporary socio-cultural settings.

The essays in this volume focus on time as an external and often troubling factor in young people’s lives, and show how emotional unrest and violence but also creativity and hope are responses to troubling times. The chapters discuss notions of time and its “objectification” in diverse locales including the Georgian Republic, Brazil, Denmark, and Uganda.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the essays in Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality use youth as a prism to understand time and its subjective experience.