BiblioVault - Books about Generation Y

All Ages Welcome

Recruiting and Retaining Younger Generations for Library Boards, Friends Groups, and Foundations

Lina Bertinelli

American Library Association, 2020

According to 2016 Pew Research Center survey data, Millennials are more likely to have visited a public library in the past year than any other adult demographic. But despite being core library users, millennials and other younger generations are often underrepresented on library boards and library advocacy groups, including Friends groups and Foundations. But you can change that, with the help of this planner’s hands-on worksheets, brainstorming activities, checklists, and expert advice. Using this toolkit from United for Libraries you will

understand generational differences and commonalities through statistics and analysis of Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z/post-Millennials;
learn how to navigate the challenges of fundraising with the “debt generations” by persuasively answering the question “what’s in it for me?”;
master the ABCs of recruitment and retention, tailoring them to fit your library;
craft several customized pitches, giving you confidence no matter the situation or audience;
discover how to cement buy-in from two key groups, current organization members and your new recruits, thereby ensuring acceptance and enthusiasm all around;
work towards defining and managing diversity for your advocacy group; and
use tried and true methods for successful onboarding of volunteers, including a Board Member Orientation Checklist and guidance on mentoring.

Using this resource, libraries of all kinds will be empowered to grow and strengthen their recruitment, retention, and training of Trustees, Friends, and Foundation members.

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Fear Your Future

How the Deck Is Stacked against Millennials and Why Socialism Would Make It Worse

Philip Klein

Templeton Press, 2019

It’s become fashionable to demean millennials as the “snowflake” generation. Raised during the peace and prosperity of the ‘90s, they’re often perceived as carrying an entitlement mentality and being incapable of handling adversity. But Philip Klein sees them differently. Given the economic headwinds they faced at the start of their working lives, millennials have shown commendable fortitude. And as Klein argues, they will need to maintain this character strength going forward because further challenges loom in their future.

The aftershocks of the Great Recession, the skyrocketing cost of living, and the titanic weight of student loan debt have made the American Dream seem to be forever retreating toward the horizon. As if that weren’t enough, millennials will face the largest federal debt in history as boomers retire and extract trillions of dollars from Social Security and Medicare—far more than they contributed.

In this concise, data-driven book, Klein begins the work of brightening the future for millennials by analyzing the problem compassionately yet objectively. There are real reasons to worry about what lies ahead if nothing changes. But the facts laid out in Klein’s book can steer the conversation to realistic solutions.

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Generational Politics in the United States

From the Silents to Gen Z and Beyond

Sally Friedman and David Schultz, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2024

The role of generations is an important, yet often overlooked, variable in the study of American politics. A topic of research in sociology, business, and marketing, the focus on generations frequently occurs in American pop culture and journalism. The general public often assumes that different generations have different political leanings and beliefs—that the Silent Generation is all Republican, white, and conservative, or that Millennials are liberal and diverse—but are these assumptions true?

Generational Politics in the United States is the first comprehensive book that examines the concept of generations from a political science perspective. It defines what a generation is and how to sort out the differences between life cycle, cohort, and aging effect. The book then brings together chapters from an array of political science scholars that examine the role of generations in American politics and how it relates to other variables such as age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. It discusses how politics in the United States are impacted by changes in generations, including how the passing of the Baby Boom generation and rise of the Millennials and Gen Z will change American politics. By examining the differences in political attitudes, engagement, and impact of recent generations, Generational Politics in the United States suggests how generational change will impact American politics in the future.

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Intimate Inequalities

Millennials' Romantic Relationships in Contemporary Times

Cristen Dalessandro

Rutgers University Press, 2021

When it comes to the topic of romantic and sexual intimacy, social observers are often quick to throw criticisms at millennials. However, we know little about millennials’ own hopes, fears, struggles, and triumphs in their relationships from the perspectives of millennials themselves. Intimate Inequalities uses millennials’ own stories to explore how they navigate gender, race, social class, sexuality, and age identities and expectations in their relationships. Situating millennials’ lives within contemporary social and cultural conditions in the United States, Intimate Inequalities takes an intersectional approach to examining how millennials challenge—or rather, uphold—social inequalities in their lives as they come into their own as full adults. Intimate Inequalities provides an in-depth look into the intimate lives of one group of millennials living in the United States, demystifying what actually goes on behind closed doors, and arguing that millennials’ private lives can reveal much about their ability to navigate inequalities in their lives more broadly.

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Japanese American Millennials

Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity

Michael Omi

Temple University Press, 2019

Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures theexperiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.

The essays by scholars both in the United States and Japan draw upon the Japanese American millennial experience to examine how they find self-expression in Youth Basketball Leagues or Christian youth camps as well as how they grapple with being mixed-race, bicultural, or queer. Featuring compelling interviews and observations, Japanese American Millennials dislodges the dominant generational framework toaddress absences in the current literature and suggests how we might alternatively study Japanese Americans as a whole.

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Millennial Fandom

Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age

Louisa Ellen Stein

University of Iowa Press, 2015

No longer a niche or cult identity, fandom now colors our notions of an expansive generational construct—the millennial generation. Like fans, millennials are frequently cast as active participants in media culture, spectators who expect opportunities to intervene, control, and create. At the same time, long-standing fears about fans’ cultural unruliness manifest in rampant stories of millennials’ technological over-dependence and lack of moral boundaries.

These conflicting narratives of entrepreneurial creativity and digital immorality operate to quell the growing threat represented by millennials’ media agency. With fan activities becoming ever more visible on social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter, Polyvore, and Tumblr, the fan has become the avatar of our digital hopes and fears.

In an ambitious study encompassing a wide range of media texts, including popular television series like Kyle XY, Glee, Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, and Pretty Little Liars and online works like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as well as fan texts from blog posts and tweets to remix videos, YouTube posts, and image-sharing streams, author Louisa Ellen Stein traces the circulation of the contradictory tropes of millennial hope and millennial noir. Looking at what millennials do with digital technology demonstrates the molding impact of commercial representations, and at the same time reveals how millennials are undermining, negotiating, and changing those narratives.

This generation—and the fans it represents—is actively transforming the media landscape into a dynamic, culturally transgressive space of collective authorship. Offering a rich and complex vision of the relationship between fandom and millennial culture, Millennial Fandom will interest fans, millennials, students, and scholars of contemporary media culture alike.

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The Millennial Generation

Implications for the Intelligence and Policy Communities

Cortney Weinbaum

RAND Corporation, 2016

In 2015, for the first time, millennials outnumbered baby boomers as the largest generational segment of the U.S. population. This report describes how the intelligence community must engage millennials across multiple segments to succeed in the future: millennials as intelligence clients, employees, and partners and as members of the public.

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Millennials in Architecture

Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession

Darius Sollohub

University of Texas Press, 2019

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosive population growth, climate change, and the density of cities, Millennials in Architecture embraces the digitally savvy disruptors who are joining the field at a crucial time as it grapples with the best ways to respond to a changing physical world.

Taking a clear-eyed look at the new generation in the context of the design professions, Darius Sollohub begins by situating Millennials in a line of generations stretching back to early Modernism, exploring how each generation negotiates the ones before and after. He then considers the present moment, closely evaluating the significance of Millennial behaviors and characteristics (from civic-mindedness to collaboration, and time management in a 24/7 culture), all underpinned by fluency in the digital world. The book concludes with an assessment of the profound changes and opportunities that Millennial disruption will bring to education, licensure, and firm management. Encouraging new alliances, Millennials in Architecture is an essential resource for the architectural community and its stakeholders.

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Millennials Killed the Video Star

MTV's Transition to Reality Programming

Amanda Ann Klein

Duke University Press, 2021

Between 1995 and 2000, the number of music videos airing on MTV dropped by 36 percent. As an alternative to the twenty-four-hour video jukebox the channel had offered during its early years, MTV created an original cycle of scripted reality shows, including Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City, Catfish, and Jersey Shore, which were aimed at predominantly white youth audiences. In Millennials Killed the Video Star Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Klein explores how this production cycle, which showcased a variety of ways of being in the world, has played a role in identity construction in contemporary youth culture—ultimately shaping the ways in which Millennial audiences of the 2000s thought about, talked about, and embraced a variety of identities.

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The Politics of Millennials

Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America's Most Diverse Generation

Stella M. Rouse and Ashley D. Ross

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Today the Millennial generation, the cohort born from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, is the largest generation in the United States. It exceeds one-quarter of the population and is the most diverse generation in U.S. history. Millennials grew up experiencing September 11, the global proliferation of the Internet and of smart phones, and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their young adulthood has been marked by rates of unemployment and underemployment surpassing those of their parents and grandparents, making them the first generation in the modern era to have higher rates of poverty than their predecessors at the same age. The Politics of Millennials explores the factors that shape the Millennial generation’s unique political identity, how this identity conditions political choices, and how this cohort’s diversity informs political attitudes and beliefs. Few scholars have empirically identified and studied the political attitudes and policy preferences of Millennials, despite the size and influence of this generation. This book explores politics from a generational perspective, first, and then combines this with other group identities that include race and ethnicity to bring a new perspective to how we examine identity politics.

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Teaching Generation M

A Handbook for Librarians and Educators

American Library Association

American Library Association, 2009

A Year of Programs for Millennials and More

Amy Alessio

American Library Association, 2015