Hilary Pilkington

In good company: risk, security and choice in young people's drug decisions

This article draws on original empirical research with young people to question the degree to which ‘individualisation of risk’, as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens, adequately explains the risks young people bear and take. It draws on alternative understandings and critiques of ‘risk’ not to refute the notion of the reflexive individual upon which ‘individualisation of risk’ is based but to re-read that reflexivity in a more hermeneutic way. It explores specific risk-laden moments – young peoples drug use decisions – in their natural social and cultural context of the friendship group. Studying these decisions in context, it suggests, reveals the meaning of ‘risk’ to be not given, but constructed through group discussion, disagreement and consensus and decisions taken to be rooted in emotional relations of trust, mutual accountability and common security. The article concludes that ‘the individualisation of risk’ fails to take adequate account of the significance of inter-subjectivity in risk-decisions. It argues also that addressing the theoretical overemphasis on the individual bearer of risk requires not only further empirical testing of the theory but appropriate methodological reflection.

?Politics are bollocks?: Youth, politics and activism in contemporary Europe?

This introductory article introduces the MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project, the findings of which are the basis of the articles in this volume. MYPLACE maps the relationship between political heritage, current levels and forms of civic and political engagement of young people in Europe, and their potential receptivity to radical and populist political agendas. In this introductory article, the implications of the projects three-way gaze – to the past, present and future – are explored by addressing three questions that run through contributions to this volume: What is politics, and why do many young people say they hate it? How does the past shape the present and the future? Are young people receptive to populist and radical right political agendas? The article outlines the distinctive case study approach to the project and its integrated mixed method design, detailing the common survey, interview, focus group and ethnographic research instruments employed in the project and the principles followed for the analysis of survey and qualitative research data.

'Vorkuta is the capital of the world': People, place and the everyday production of the local

This article considers the relationship between people and place in the everyday production of the local. Based on empirical research with young people in Russias far north it offers an empirically substantiated argument that processes of deterritorialization do not necessarily imply the disembedding of people from either the national or the local. Drawing on discursive psychological approaches to the construction of nationhood, the article demonstrates how national and local patriotisms are produced through a post-Soviet project of nationalism and an active programme of flagging the city by the city administration. Through an exploration of the everyday manifestation and articulation of ties between people and place, however, it also suggests some of the limitations to theories of the everyday discursive production of nationhood. Connections to place, it is argued, are not only unconscious or linguistic expressions of discursively produced subjects, but emotional and sensual responses to the material (urban space, nature, climate) and symbolic (hymns, flags, historical narratives) environment. This suggests the need to conceptualize place as a site of the active production and enactment of subjectivity, which is itself not only the product of language and discourse but of experience, affect and ‘matter’.

Going Home? The Implications of Forced Migration for National Identity Formation in post-Soviet Russia

There is a growing academic literature in the West concerning the origins and future of the ‘Russian diaspora’ (see Bremmer, 1994; Kolstoe, 1995; Melvin, 1994; Shlapentokh et al., 1994). This term refers to the 25 million ethnic Russians1 who have been displaced politically in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, finding themselves resident in the new geopolitical space referred to as Russia’s ‘near abroad’.

‘Loud and proud’: youth and the politics of silencing

This article considers negative or critical views towards democracy and politics among young people, including supporters of ultra-patriotic or populist radical right movements, in the UK, eastern Germany and Russia. These countries represent a range of political heritages and current constitutions of democracy but, in all three contexts, it is suggested, young people experience some degree of the closing down of ‘legitimate’ political discourse as a result of the social distance between ‘politicians’ and ‘people like us’ and the legal and cultural circumscriptions on ‘acceptable’ issues for discussion. The article draws on survey data, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic case studies from the MYPLACE project to show variation between young people in these three countries in their experience of formal politics as a ‘politics of silencing’. Moreover, the article explores the relationship between perceived ‘silencing’, the expression of dissatisfaction with democracy and receptivity to populist radical right ideology.

Employing meta-ethnography in the analysis of qualitative data sets on youth activism: a new tool for transnational research projects?:

This article outlines a novel application of meta-ethnographic synthesis in the analysis of multiple ethnographic case studies of youth activism emanating from a large transnational European research project. Although meta-ethnography is used increasingly as an alternative to systematic review for the synthesis of published qualitative studies, it is not widely applied to the synthesis of primary data. This article suggests such a use is not precluded epistemologically and potentially addresses a growing need as ethnography itself becomes increasingly ‘multi-sited’. The article outlines the practical process of adapting meta-ethnography to primary data analysis drawing on the synthesis of 44 ethnographic cases of youth activism and provides a worked example of the translation of cases and resulting ‘line of argument’. It discusses the challenges and limitations of the approach in particular the danger that, in extracting the general from the specific, the key quality of qualitative data – individual differentiation – is diminished.

EDL Angels Stand beside Their Men … Not behind Them: The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in an Anti-Islam(ist) Movement.

ABSTRACT This article revisits the view that women are absent or insignificant across the extreme right spectrum. It draws on ethnographic research with grassroots activists in the English Defence League to explore whether a new generation of populist radical right movements offers a gender politics and practice capable of appealing to women and LGBT constituencies. It critically interrogates claims that the movement has made real shifts in the openness to, and roles played by, women and LGBT activists and asks whether the adoption of gender equality and gay rights rhetoric reflects such change or is an essentially instrumental move. Finally it considers how gender and sexual politics are played out in everyday practice in the movement. It concludes that while openness to women and LGBT supporters and activists is more than the top-down imposition of a strategically useful ideology, attitudes and behaviours among activists remain highly diverse, ambivalent and often conflicted.

Sounds of a ?rotting city?: Punk in Russia?s Arctic Hinterland

Russia is far from the natural habitat of punk. Since its emergence in Soviet Russia of the late 1970s (Steinholt, 2005, pp. 69–70), punk has defied de facto any structuralist explanation of the movement as the manifestation of resistance to capitalism’s attempt to repress and contain desires into forms useful to capitalists (Thompson, 2004). At the same time, readings of British punk as the culmination of twentieth-century radical aesthetic movements such as avant-garde Dadaism, futurism, surrealism, or expressionism (Marcus, 1989) have little resonance in state-socialist societies, where 1968 was associated not with student radicalism but with the crushing of the Prague Spring. Arguments that punk was the product of rock music turning against its own commercialization (Savage, 1991, p. xv) or the disengagement of radical counter-culture from its increasingly industrially incorporated soundtrack (Moore, 2010, pp. 5–8) also fall short of the mark. Punk in late Soviet Russia shared the underground with other forms of rock music rather than being pitted against the popular music industry (Pilkington, 1994, p. 229). Indeed, given that in 1976–1977 rock music was still struggling to establish itself, there was little need for punk’s musical revolt against its, as yet unestablished, canons (Gololobov and Steinholt, 2014, p. 22). Yet punk has proven to be more than a momentary, mimetic phenomenon in Russia. After its emergence in Leningrad and then Moscow, it extended into the Russian hinterland and developed a distinctive sound associated primarily with the Siberian punk wave and, in particular, the music of Egor Letov and the band Grazhdanskaia Oborona (Steinholt, 2012).

Conclusion: What is the ‘Value Added’ of Multi-method, Transnational Research?

This concluding chapter reflects on the challenges of conducting ‘complex’ social science research using the experience of the MYPLACE project. It recognises the compromises to methodological conformism necessary for its successful implementation and seeks to elicit the ‘value added’ gained. It explores, specifically, whether: the case study based survey allowed a more nuanced understanding of difference; the transnational comparison of qualitative data allowed conclusions to be drawn beyond the single case; and the triangulation of data brought new insight beyond that offered by survey or qualitative data alone. It concludes that the value added of the MYPLACE project is heightened elucidation of the meaning young people attach to politics and activism and thus why they choose, or choose not, to participate politically and civically.

Introduction: Thinking Globally, Understanding Locally

In the introductory chapter to this volume, the editors reflect on the experience of conducting pan-European research (in 30 locations in 14 countries) into young people’s civic and political engagement as part of the MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project. They outline the central research questions and the rationale for the case study and mixed methods approach adopted in the MYPLACE project upon which the subsequent contributions to the volume draw. They consider the potential added explanatory value that can be derived from this approach, as well as the challenges it generates. They conclude that an integrated multi-method case study approach can allow researchers to ‘think globally’, while retaining the necessary sensitivity to local and national context to ‘understand locally’.