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Boy choirs are one of the oldest musical traditions in the Western world. While audiences admire boy singers for their distinctive treble notes, boys who sing in soprano voices have to contend with the notion that they’re doing something effeminate, even emasculating, because they sing in a vocal range typically reserved for women and girls. Known as the “unchanged trebles” within choirs, boys who sing in soprano voices defy prevailing norms of traditional masculinity. What do boy choirs represent in a culture that increasingly sees gender as an individual choice rather than a fixed, biological category? And is this tradition, which is rooted in exclusion of girls and women, one worth saving?

In Unchanged Trebles, Rebekah Peeples charts an unexpected, thought-provoking, and deeply personal journey into the peculiar world of contemporary boy choirs, where boys learn to do something together that they’re often embarrassed to do alone: sing in their soprano voices. Considering her experience as the unlikely mother of a boy soprano alongside dozens of interviews with current directors and former choristers, she argues that some of the tools for creating a more gender-inclusive future can be found in an ancient tradition that has long recognized gender fluidity within the pre-pubescent male body. With humor, insight, and the voice of a gifted storyteller, Unchanged Trebles explores a cultural tradition in which singing and expressing emotion are encouraged for boys, showing them a more expansive form of masculinity as they transition from boyhood to manhood.

Undocumented in the U.S. South is a rare look into the everyday realities of undocumented youth in K-12 public schools. In an anti-immigrant policy context, youth and their families navigate historical and current legacies and realities of segregation, racial discrimination, and inequality. With a deep three-year ethnographic study, hundreds of hours of observational research, interviews, and policy analysis, Sophia Rodriguez traces the lives of undocumented youth across multiple public school settings. Her research underscores how these youth are racialized through state policies, school and organizational practices, and everyday interactions with educators and peers. As the first study of its kind to combine this unique framework for analysis, Undocumented in the U.S. South sheds light on the challenges youth face in their everyday struggle to belong. Rodriguez invites us to consider youth experiences as central knowledge for improving educators’ awareness and school practice, while promoting policies that are humanizing and rooted in youth experience.

A guide to supporting children’s wellbeing in cities, through their own perspectives.

Bringing together insights from critical childhood studies, urban studies, and child public health, Urban Childhoods examines the distinct experiences of children growing up in English cities with an emphasis on centering the voices of children and their families. The volume explores how to prioritize children’s wellbeing in urban planning, focusing primarily on children’s definitions of what they need to thrive: stable relationships, access to engaging activities, and having a voice in decisions that affect their lives. Alongside the more theoretical literature on urban childhood, authors regularly reference strategies from a major prevention program conducted in two English cities between 2019 and 2025.