This article reviews educational literatures that should be relevant to helping individuals understand and improve the lot and life chances of girls and boys who are at risk in a global world. The authors began this review with a vignette from India, a country whose linguistic and ethnic diversity, whose international reputation for advances in information technologies, and whose considerable progress and remaining challenges related to taming poverty and offering education to a large proportion of its population are well known. The authors attempt to situate discussions of at riskness within a discourse of the global, but also they keep the moral entailments of living in a global society in view and attempt to sort out the implications that may accrue from this stance for future educational research. They look first at how notions of being at risk as a young person have been formed in the United States, influenced through the lenses of the disciplines of psychology and sociology; how resulting notions of risk and their implications seem to have spread internationally; and to what effect. Next, they review recent literature that has examined global youth, a diverse scholarship hailing primarily from cultural studies and anthropology that attempts to describe and theorize the experiences of youth around the world as they confront the challenges of contemporary life. They discuss an "aesthetic turn" in this scholarship and in the actions and products of youth. They conclude with descriptions of promising projects and research related to youth at risk and equity in a global world. (Contains 7 notes.)