A Critical Approach To Youth Culture

"Adolescent culture is always changing, making it difficult for youth pastors to keep up. Even college students who are a few years out of high school find it challenging to stay current with the changing culture of teens. However, when equipped with tools that help them think critically about culture on a broad scale, youth ministry students can be prepared for a strategic ministry to teens that effectively addresses the youth cultural context. This academic resource uses a multi-disciplinary approach to understand culture by exploring the nature, theology, ecology, and ethnography of culture, then combining these different perspectives to develop a critical approach to youth culture."

The reality is, youth culture and teenagers continue to change, but you can stay connected and relevant by understanding culture and its power to influence and shape adolescents. In this practical and insightful text, you'll develop your own cohesive plan for evaluating cultural influences, preparing for strategic ministry to teenagers that effectively addresses the youth cultural context.

Within contemporary youth research there are two dominant streams - a 'transitions' and a 'cultures' perspective. This collection shows that it is no longer possible to understand the experience of young people through these prisms and proposes new conceptual foundations for youth studies, capable of bridging the gap between these approaches.

The Subcultural Imagination discusses young adults in subcultures and examines how sociologists use qualitative research methods to study them. Through the application of the ideas of C. Wright Mills to the development of theory-reflexive ethnography, this book analyses the experiences of young people in different subcultural settings, as well as reflecting on how young people in subcultures interact in the wider context of society, biography and history. From Cuba to London, and Bulgaria to Asia, this book delves into urban spaces and street corners, young people’s parties, gigs, BDSM fetish clubs, school, the home, and feminist zines to offer a picture of live sociology in practice. In three parts, the volume explores: history, biography and subculture; practising reflexivity in the field; epistemologies, pedagogies and the subcultural subject. The book offers cutting edge theory and rich empirical research on social class, gender and ethnicities from both established and new researchers across diverse disciplinary backgrounds. It moves the subcultural debate beyond the impasse of the term’s relevance, to one where researchers are fully engaged with the lives of the subcultural subjects. This innovative edited collection will appeal to scholars and students in the areas of sociology, youth studies, media and cultural studies/communication, research methods and ethnography, popular music studies, criminology, politics, social and cultural theory, and gender studies.

This book brings together historians, sociologists and social scientists to examine aspects of youth culture. The book’s themes are riots, music and gangs, connecting spectacular expression of youthful disaffection with everyday practices. By so doing, Youth Culture and Social Change maps out new ways of historicizing responses to economic and social change: public unrest and popular culture.

This book examines the relation between the phenomenon of globalization, changes in the lifeworld of young people and the development of specific youth cultures. It explores the social, political, economic and cultural impact of globalization on young people. Growing diversity in their lifeworlds, technological development, migration and the ubiquity of digital communication and representation of the world open up new forms of self-representation, networking and political expression, which are described and discussed in the book. Other topics are the impact of globalization on work and economy, global environmental issues such as climate change, political movements which put “nationalism first”, change of youth`s values and the significance of body, gender and beauty. The book highlights the challenges of young people in modern life, as well as the way in which they express themselves and engage in society – in culture, politics, work and social life.

First published in 1995, Youth Cultures critically studies an anthropologically neglected population: the youth. The book broadens the scope for analysing young people’s behaviour by moving away from notions of resistance and deviance and offers a range of ethnographically based studies of different kinds of youth in varied national contexts. From Nepal to Canada, Europe, the Solomon Islands and Algeria, it addresses issues relating to globalisation in Third World cities, ethnic diversity in European cities and consumption practices, and places the lives of these young people in the contexts of wider cultures. Youth Cultures contributes to the general concern in anthropology with ‘rewriting’ culture, even while it seeks to close particular gaps in studies on youth culture. By challenging the limitation of previous youth research and acknowledging children and young adults as agents to be respected rather than objectified, this book will be invaluable reading to students of anthropology, sociology, education, psychology, and cultural studies.

This edited collection brings together scholars who draw on phenomenological approaches to understand the experiences of young people growing up under contemporary conditions of globalization. Phenomenology is both a philosophical and pragmatic approach to social sciences research, that takes as central the meaning-making experiences of research participants. One of the central contentions of this book is that phenomenology has long informed critical empirical approaches to youth cultures, yet until recently its role has not been thusly named. This volume aims to resuscitate and recuperate phenomenology as a robust empirical, theoretical, and methodological approach to youth cultures. Chapters explore the lifeworlds of young people from countries around the world, revealing the tensions, risks and opportunities that organize youth experiences.