About Us
Founders
Mike Males, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
Mike Males got into youth-facts work at the ground level, working directly in family, community, and wilderness programs with children and teenagers for 15 years. After personally seeing the huge discrepancies between the way youths are depicted in authoritative and media forums and realities in homes and communities, he returned to graduate school in the 1990s to study whether his impressions were correct.
The first issue he discovered was a gigantic decline in teenaged suicide in California which somehow had escaped researchers’ notice, the first of many findings on crime, drugs, mental health, gun violence, socioeconomics, race, and other issues that led him to question why — to this day — the most august institutions dispense so many blatant falsehoods about adolescents.
After obtaining a PhD in Social Ecology from UC Irvine in 1999, he taught sociology, psychology, and epidemiology at the University of California for seven years, focused on research findings on the science of youth issues. He has published four books and scores of journal articles and op-eds in The Lancet, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Adolescent Research, Journal of Safety Research, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. He is currently senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco, and is working on a fifth book on modern adolescence.
Dream of the Anarquistas by Mike A. Males
Paperback – Amazon/Kindle Books – 2024
This jolting futuristic novel follows three misfit girls from widely varied backgrounds:
Rhona, a runaway growing up in riot-torn Los Angeles of 1992 and careening into roller-coaster adulthood; Aj’s evolution as a visionary teenage sexcort negotiating the rubbled streets of earthquake/tsunami-wrecked “post-industrial national park” San Francisco; and cyberwired middle-schooler Ashlae’s restless chafings on floor 868-East of the two-mile-high “arcology” rehousing Sacramento of 2048.
Their perilous multigenerational quest to reconcile violently divided, climate-changed America features the cultural-demographic war pitting dynamic New California 2.0 and God’s Texahoma as semi-independent nations, including a denouement in mistimed eco-sabotage. Veering between dystopian and utopian, the novel presents striking, bizarre visions of the sexes, politics, race, climate-changed environment, renegade young, weird old people, ghosts of the Sixties, oddball alliances transforming future society, and (why not?) bombings and serial killers … all combining to suggest ways out of the 2020s’ dismal messes.
Anthony Bernier, Ph.D., Project Director
Anthony Bernier, PhD, is professor at the nation’s largest library school program: California’s San Jose State University School of Information. As a critical youth studies scholar, his primary field of research explores the administration of library services with young people. The iSchool has awarded him Distinguished Service, Outstanding Professor, and Outstanding Researcher Awards. He has been awarded two National Leadership Grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (studying library spaces for young people) and many grants from the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association for Library and Information Sciences Education (ALISE) to study the experiences of first-generation professionals as graduate students.
Dr. Bernier served a four-year ALA presidential appointment to the Committee on Accreditation, chaired several national professional and academic associations, including two elected terms as ALA’s Library History Round Table chair, and published a regular “YA Strike Zone” column for Voice of Youth Advocates (between 2013-2019). As a practicing YA specialist librarian and administrator for 15 years, he designed the first purpose-built library space for teenaged youth: the Los Angeles Public Library’s acclaimed TeenS’cape Department, and produced nationally recognized youth outreach and programming models. Dr. Bernier completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, examining changing notions of public space in twentieth-century America. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, and rides a Vespa P200E and a BMW C650GT.
Milo Santamaria, MLIS Student & Webmaster
Milo Santamaria is an MLIS student at San Jose State University, and an aspiring children’s librarian. They have been volunteering with children and youth organizations for most of their life and earned a bachelor’s degree in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. While at university, Milo was also a fellow with UCSC’s Everett program, a student-led organization focused on using technology to create social change. Milo has co-led youth workshops on prison abolition, and helped maintain websites for Everett and its community partners. Milo also has three associates degrees in Sociology, Anthropology and Social Sciences from Pasadena City College. Milo currently lives in Southern California and has two pet guinea pigs named Phoebe and Cannoli.