Youth Subcultures

Youth Subcultures uses a cultural studies lens to explore contemporary American youth subcultures such as skateboarding, punk, Goth, and raves in a brief, flexible, and inexpensive reader. Part of the Longman Topics reader series, this collection of lively essays on controversial subcultures helps students think critically about contemporary culture and issues such as class, race, and gender as well as language, identity, and ritual. Youth Subcultures also contains a variety of writing genres that range from personal creative non-fiction to interviews to traditional research and argumentative essays. Rather than write about topics beyond their experience, students can examine their own experiences critically as they engage an exciting and accessible scholarly field.

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.

Radical youth work is gaining popularity as a means of teaching adults how, in collaboration with youth, they can challenge dominant ways of knowing. This study uses two particular subcultures, skinheads and punks, to explore how constructions of subcultures in time, language, space, body practice, and identity offer alternative ways of understanding youth-adult relationships. In doing so, it investigates youth work as a radical political process and suggests a new approach to current subculture theory. In Youth and Subculture as Creative Force, Hans Arthur Skott-Myhre interviews six youths who identify themselves as members of either punk or traditional skinhead subcultures. He discusses the results of these interviews and demonstrates how youth perspectives have come to inform his understanding of himself as a youth worker and scholar. Youth subcultures, he argues, have considerable potential for improving relations between youths and adults in the postmodern capitalist world. Drawing on Marxist, Foucauldian, and postmodernist theory, Skott-Myhre uses the subjective formations outlined in his study to offer recommendations for constructing legitimate radical youth work that takes into account for the perspectives of young people.

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection explores the representation, articulation and construction of youth subcultures in a range of texts and contexts. It brings together scholars working in literary studies, screen studies, sociology and cultural studies whose research interests lie in the aesthetics and cultural politics of youth. It contributes to, and extends, contemporary theoretical perspectives around youth and youth cultures. Contributors examine a range of topics, including ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s, novels by subcultural writers such as Colin MacInnes, Alex Wheatle and Courttia Newland, as well as screen representations of Mods, the 1990s Rave culture, heavy metal, and the Manchester scene. Others explore interventions into subcultural theory with respect to metal, subcultural locations, abjection, graffiti cultures, and the potential of subcultures to resist dominant power frameworks in both historical and contemporary contexts.

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

The demise of state Socialisms caused radical social, cultural and economic changes in Eastern Europe. Since then, young people have been confronted with fundamental disruptions and transformations to their daily environment, while an unsettling, globalized world substantially reshapes local belongings and conventional values. In times of multiple instabilities and uncertainties, this volume argues, young people prefer to try to adjust to given circumstances than to adopt the behaviour of potential rebellious, adolescent role models, dissident counter-cultures or artistic breakings of taboo. Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context takes this situation as a starting point for an examination of generational change, cultural belongings, political activism and everyday practices of young people in different Eastern European countries from an interdisciplinary perspective. It argues that the conditions of global change not only call for a differentiated evaluation of youth cultures, but also for a revision of our understanding of 'youth' itself – in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Mike Brake suggests that subcultures develop in response to social problems which a group experiences collectively, and shows how individuals draw on collective identities to define themselves.