The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps

Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century

EMILY K. ABEL AND MARGARET K. NELSON

“Tamarack Farm, the Farm and Wilderness work camp, changed my life during my four summers. Counsellors and campers opened my eyes to a bigger world and encouraged me to help make it a better world. This book is a labor of love that describes why so many of us feel that way about F&W.”

—John Wilhelm, Tamarack Farm 1960–1963, retired union president

The well-known Farm & Wilderness (F&W) camps, founded in 1939 by Ken and Susan Webb, resembled most other private camps of the same period in many ways, but the Farm & Wilderness camps were some of the first private camps to become racially integrated. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson explore how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured by the camps to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understandings of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crises of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.

EMILY K. ABEL is a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health. She is the author of many books including Prelude to Hospice: Florence Wald, Dying People, and Their Families (Rutgers University Press) and Elder Care in Crisis: How the Social Safety Net Fails Families

MARGARET K. NELSON is A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emerita of Sociology at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. Most recently she is the author of Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s

Ways of Belonging

Undocumented Youth in the Shadow of Illegality

FRANCESCA MELONI

Ways of Belonging

Ways of Belonging examines the experiences of undocumented young people who are excluded from K–12 schools in Canada and are rendered invisible to the education system. Canadian law doesn’t mention the existence of undocumented children, and thus their access to education rests on discretionary practices and is often denied altogether. This book brings the stories of undocumented young people vividly alive, putting them into conversation with the perspectives of the different actors in schools and courts who fail to include these young people.

Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Francesca Meloni shows how ambivalence shapes the lives of young people who are caught between the desire to belong and the impossibility of fully belonging. Meloni pays close attention to these young people’s struggles and hopes, showing us what it means to belong and to endure in contexts of social exclusion. Ways of Belonging reveals the opacities and failures of a system that excludes children from education and puts their lives in invisibility mode.

FRANCESCA MELONI is an assistant professor in social justice at King’s College London.

182 pp 5.5 x 8.5

978-1-9788-3549-8 paper $29.95S

978-1-9788-3550-4 cloth $120.00SU

October 2023

Migration Studies • Human Rights Childhood Studies

Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies