Jessica Taft received her BA at Macalester College and her PhD at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Her areas of specialization are youth activism; childhood and youth studies; social movements; participatory democracy; girls studies; Latin American radicalisms; feminist theory; qualitative and participatory research methods.
Jessica K. Taft’s research focuses on the political lives of children and youth in North and South America. She has ongoing intellectual interests in the role of young people in social change and the complex relationship between political cultures, identity narratives, and social movement practices. Her scholarship engages with several disparate sociological and interdisciplinary fields, including work on youth citizenship, children's rights, social movements, participatory democracy, Latin American radicalisms, and feminist theory. Her first book, Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (NYU 2011), is an ethnography of teenage girl activists in five cities in North and South America. She has published on a range of topics related to youth politics, including articles on “girl power” discourses, girls’ organizations and ideas about the public sphere, peer-driven political socialization amongst activist youth, and youth activists' conceptions of democracy, as well as an edited volume on youth citizenship and civic-political engagement. Jessica is now working on a book manuscript that focuses on intergenerational collaboration in the Peruvian movement of working children. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Davidson College and a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame. She holds a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Macalester College and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
