Young Europeans in a changing world.

The authors in this volume report what it is like to be young in the rapidly changing, enormously diverse world region that is early 21st-century Europe. The chapters privilege a decidedly sociological analysis of youth as a social and cultural construction and sets of contemporary social and cultural practices characteristic of young people and young adults living in European societies. In doing so, they signal a dual conviction. First, conceptualizing and understanding child and adolescent development also require the more structural perspectives that sociologists bring to macrolevel and microlevel theorizing. Second, the authors in this volume use the terms youth and young people rather than adolescence and adolescents, and they routinely introduce the terms young adulthood and young adults into their analyses. In this way, they underline the importance of research perspectives anchored in the study of the life course as a historically and culturally specific social phenomenon. Furthermore, this phenomenon is firmly situated within the large-scale economic and political change processes currently taking place in Europe and in the global context of Europe as a world region in interaction with other world regions. As a North American–based series with a largely North American readership, the New Directions series has published content that has naturally centered on North American debates and research findings. This issue