Professor Rebecca Raby

Profile

Rebecca Raby is a sociologist in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, Canada. She studies constructions of childhood and youth, intersecting gender, sexuality, race and class-based inequalities in young lives, and theories of participation and agency. Her recent publications include School Rules: Discipline, Obedience and Elusive Democracy (2012, UTP), Smart Girls: Success, School and the Myth of Post-Feminism (2017, University of California Press) (with Shauna Pomerantz) and The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada (2018, Canadian Scholars’ Press (with Xiaobei Chen and Patrizia Albanese).

Research

Publications

Raby, R., K.Waboso, L.Donison, E.Harding, K. Grossman, H.Myatt, and L.C. Sheppard. (2021) "School is closed! Opportunity, challenge, and inequality in the early days of the pandemic" Journal of Teaching and Learning, special issue on “Emerging Research on the Impacts of COVID-19 for Children, Youth and Education”

Raby, R. and L.C. Sheppard. (2021) “Constructs of childhood, generation and heroism in editorials on young people's climate change activism: Their mobilisation and effects” Children and Society, 35(3):380-394.

Sheppard, L.C., R.Raby and W. Lehmann (2019) “Grill Guys and Drive-Through Girls: Discourses of Gender in Young People’s Part-Time Work” Journal of Childhood Studies, 44(3): 56-69.

Pomerantz, S. and R. Raby (2018) “Girls, Intra-Active: Dynamic Agency and the Negotiation of Smart Girlhood” Gender and Education, 23(5):549-564.

Raby, R., W. Lehmann, J. Helleiner and R. Easterbrook (2018) “’I’ll be more Prepared than most People’: Young People Talking about their First Jobs” Childhood 25(2):237-252.

Chen, X., R. Raby and P. Albanese (2018) Edited collection, The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada. Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Pomerantz, S and R. Raby (2017) Smart Girls: Success, School and the Myth of Post-Feminism. University of California Press. Raby, R. (2014) “Children's Participation as Neo-Liberal Governance?” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(1): 77-89.

Raby, R. (2012) School Rules: Obedience, discipline and elusive democracy. University of Toronto Press.

Raby, R. (2010) “’Tank Tops Should be OK but I Don’t Want to see her Thong’: Girls, Dress Codes and the Regulation of Femininity.” Youth and Society. 41(3):333-356.

Expertise