UW's Susan Dewey co-editor of Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters and Xenomaniacs: Gender and Modernity in Global Youth

From a UW press release:

A timely collection of essays that explores how modern youth around the world are forging new identities is the focus of a new book written by University of Wyoming cultural anthropologist Susan Dewey.

An assistant professor in the UW Gender and Women Studies Program, Dewey is the co-editor of "Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters and Xenomaniacs: Gender and Modernity in Global Youth."  The book will be published by the Syracuse University Press in May.

The book portrays how rapidly changing economic, communication and media environments influence how today's youth define themselves. The book gives ethnographic detail that explores how young women and men in diverse societies negotiate a place -- suspended between the present and the future -- for themselves.

"My co-editor and I undertook this project after we decided that a book focused upon youth in Africa, Asia and Oceania was long overdue, particularly considering that youth constitute a majority in many countries in these geographical areas," Dewey says.

Dewey teaches the Introduction to Women's Studies course and a methods course. She is now teaching a course on sex work and sex trafficking, and also teaches a gender and global change course.

Her current research involves an ethnographic study in a homeless shelter in Denver, Colo. The study is designed to engage law enforcement officers and social service providers about their perceptions of what constitutes force and coercion within prostitution.

Dewey also is the author of "Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy and the State in Global Perspective"; "Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town"; "Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia and India"; and "Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Post-liberalization India."

Dewey joined the UW faculty in 2010. She received a bachelor's degree (1999) at Stony Brook University; and received master's (2002) and doctorate degrees (2004) at Syracuse University.

Photo: Susan Dewey, an assistant professor of gender and women studies at UW, co-edited a new book that portrays how rapidly changing economic, communication and media environments influence how today's youth define themselves. (Lorrie McNamee Photo)