Campus Directory

Pronouns she, her, her, hers, herself

Division Social Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Latin American & Latino Studies

Title Professor
Faculty Director of the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Sociology Department
Community Studies Program
Education Department

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Activism
Youth Studies
Latin American and Latino Studies
Sociology
Democracy

Web Site

Primary Office Location Merrill College Academic Building
106

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours F25: Wednesdays 1pm-3pm and by appointment

Mail Stop Merrill/Crown Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Rooted in critical interdisciplinary approaches to child and youth studies, Dr. Taft’s research focuses on young people’s contributions to social change through activism and social movements in North and South America.  Building on nearly twenty years of research with young activists, she is increasingly focused on these young people’s encounters with adult-run political institutions and the various programs that seek to include them in policy-making.  In this vein, she is currently working on a book project that looks at the history of how children’s political participation has been imagined, produced, and institutionalized within the child rights sphere.

She is the author of Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (NYU Press, 2011), The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children (NYU Press, 2019), and numerous journal articles on girls’ activism, children’s participation, youth politics, and critical civic engagement.  Dr. Taft is part of a variety of local, national, and international collaborative projects focused on child and youth participation and has worked with funders and non-governmental organizations to deepen their analysis of the challenges and possibilities of meaningful engagement with young people.

Research Interests

youth activism; childhood and youth studies; social movements; participatory democracy; girls studies; feminist theory; qualitative and participatory research methods.

Teaching Interests

Latin American and Latinx Youth Movements; Youth and Citizenship; Latin American Childhoods; The Politics of Childhood and Youth; Latin American Social Movements; Qualitative Research Methods.

Selected Publications

• The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru's Movement of Working Children(2019, NYU Press)
• Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (2011, NYU Press)

• Social movements, INGOs, and the meaning of children’s political participation: lessons from the 1997 Oslo Working Children’s Forum
• Questioning Children's Activism: What is new or old in theory and practice? (with Claire O'Kane)
• Hopeful, Harmless, and Heroic: Figuring the Girl Activist as Global Savior
• “Adults Talk Too Much”: Intergenerational Dialogue and Power in the Peruvian Movement of Working Children
• Continually Redefining Protagonismo: The Peruvian Movement of Working Children and Political Change, 1976–2015
• Youth Activists, Youth Councils, and Constrained Democracy (with Hava Gordon)
• Rethinking Youth Political Socialization: Teenage Activists Talk Back (with Hava Gordon)