Coming of Age in Times of Crisis is an ethnographic study of secondary
school youth growing up in a rural town in the Venezuelan Andes in the
1990s. Janise Hurtig draws on her experiences as a school ethnographer,
English teacher, and student advisor, to provide an engaging, intimate,
and critical exploration of the ways Santa Lucian students learned
about, made sense of, and worked with the conflicting dreams and
disillusions, promises and expectations of formal education and
negligent patriarchy, to create individual adult identities. Through the
concepts of "coming of age" and "crisis," Hurtig explores connections
between the ethnographic subject and the ethnographer's subjectivity.